Interactive Glyph Placement for Tensor Fields

Visualization of glyphs has a long history in medical imaging but gains much more power when the glyphs are properly placed to fill the screen. Glyph packing is often performed via an iterative approach to improve the location of glyphs. We present an alternative implementation of glyph packing based on a Delaunay triangulation to speed up the clustering process and reduce costs for neighborhood searches. Our approach does not require a re–computation of acceleration structures when a plane is moved through a volume, which can be done interactively. We provide two methods for initial placement of glyphs to improve the convergence of our algorithm for glyphs larger and glyphs smaller than the data set’s voxel size. The main contribution of this paper is a novel approach to glyph packing that supports simpler parameterization and can be used easily for highly efficient interactive data exploration, in contrast to previous methods.