Information-Aware HyperOctree for Effective Isosurface Rendering of Large Scale Time-Varying Data

We develop a new indexing structure and a new out-of-core scheme to extract and render isosurfaces for large scale time-varying 3-D volume data. The new algorithm enables the fast visualization of arbitrary isosurfaces cut by a user-specified hyperplane along any of the four dimensions. Our data structure makes use of the entropy measure to establish the relative resolutions of the spatial and temporal dimensions rather than treating the temporal dimension just as any other dimension. The preprocessing is very efficient and the resulting indexing structure is very compact. We have tested our scheme on 40GB subset of the Richtmyer-Meshkov instability data set and obtained very good performance for a wide range of isosurface extraction queries. Index Terms Isosurface extraction and rendering, Indexing methods, Out-of-core techniques, Time-varying fields