Importance driven texture-based vector field visualization

Texture-based method is a very promising way to visualize 3D vector fields. However, since each pixel in the texture is equally treated in all this kind of methods, important structures and details in a field cannot be highlighted. Meanwhile, it is very time-consuming. In this paper, we introduce the notion of "importance map" and describe how importance values are derived from the intrinsic properties of a vector field. We also give the techniques to accelerate the generation of a texture image, highlight important structures in a vector field and generate a texture image with different granularity by "importance map". Experimental results show that our method is available and efficient.