Feature-Based Uncertainty Visualization

While uncertainty in scientific data attracts an increasing research interest in the visualization community, two critical issues remain insufficiently studied: (1) visualizing the impact of the uncertainty of a data set on its features and (2) interactively exploring 3D or large 2D data sets with uncertainties. In this chapter, a suite of feature-based techniques is developed to address these issues. First, an interactive visualization tool for exploring scalar data with data-level, contour-level, and topology-level uncertainties is developed. Second, a framework of visualizing feature-level uncertainty is proposed to study the uncertain feature deviations in both scalar and vector data sets. With quantified representation and interactive capability, the proposed feature-based visualizations provide new insights into the uncertainties of both data and their features which otherwise would remain unknown with the visualization of only data uncertainties.