Uncertainty Visualization Methods in Isosurface Rendering
 		    
Abstract:

We describe two techniques for rendering isosurfaces in multiresolution volume data such that the uncertainty (error) in the data is shown in the resulting visualization. In general the visualization of uncertainty in data is difficult, but the nature of isosurface rendering makes it amenable to an effective solution. In addition to showing the error in the data used to generate the isosurface, we also show the value of an additional data variate on the isosurface. The results combine multiresolution and uncertainty visualization techniques into a hybrid approach. Our technique is applied to multiresolution examples from the medical domain.

Project: This work is a result of a collaboration between the Computer Science Department at the University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH and the application research project ``multi-disciplanary visualization'' in the VRVis Research Center, Area 3, Project 2, which is funded by an Austrian governmental research project called Kplus and AVL.
Papers: Uncertainty Visualization Methods in Isosurface Rendering, by Philip J. Rhodes, Robert S. Laramee, R. Daniel Bergeron, and Ted M. Sparr in EUROGRAPHICS 2003 Short Papers, M. Chover, H. Hagen and D. Tost Editors, pages 83-88, September 1-5 2003, Granada, Spain ( PDF format ) Uncertainty Visualization Methods in Isosurface Rendering, by Philip J. Rhodes, Robert S. Laramee, R. Daniel Bergeron, and Ted M. Sparr, VRVis Techinical Report, TR-VRVis-2003-019
Results:

Three isosurfaces corresponding to skin, isovalue 0.185, with uncertainty disabled: (left) 1283, (middle) 643, (right) 323

The same three isosurfaces from with uncertainty mapped to hue in the range (144, 0): (left) 1283, (middle) 643, (right) 323

(left) An adaptive resolution isosurface corresponding to bone, isovalue 0.378, with uncertainty mapped to hue in the range (144, 0), (middle) uncertainty mapped to hue in the range (108, 0), 643, (right) uncertainty mapped to hue in the range (108, 0), 323

(left) A) Varying hue only, B) Texture of increasing opacity over constant hue, C) Increasing opacity over varying hue (middle) Error mapped to texture opacity over a constant hue, (right) Error mapped opacity over a hue mapped to a synthetic variate

A close up of the forehead region from the above figure, right. The texture can be clearly seen, but interferes minimally with the underlying hue.
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