Farthest Point Seeding for Placement of Streamlines

We propose a novel algorithm for placement of streamlines from two-dimensional steady vector or direction fields. Our method consists of placing one streamline at a time by numerical integration started the furthest away from all previously placed streamlines. Such a farthest point seeding strategy leads to high quality placements by favoring long streamlines, while retaining uniformity with the increasing density. We show in a series of comparative results several improvements over state-of-the-art methods for three important aspects: placement quality, simplicity and efficiency. Robustness as well as efficiency is achieved through the use of a Delaunay triangulation to model the streamlines, address proximity queries and determine the biggest voids by exploiting the empty circle property. Our method handles variable density and extends to multiresolution.