Streak Lines as Tangent Curves of a Derived Vector Field

—Characteristic curves of vector fields include stream, path, and streak lines. Stream and path lines can be obtained by a simple vector field integration of an autonomous ODE system, i.e., they can be described as tangent curves of a vector field. This facilitates their mathematical analysis including the extraction of core lines around which stream or path lines exhibit swirling motion, or the computation of their curvature for every point in the domain without actually integrating them. Such a description of streak lines is not yet available, which excludes them from most of the feature extraction and analysis tools that have been developed in our community. In this paper, we develop the first description of streak lines as tangent curves of a derived vector field – the streak line vector field – and show how it can be computed from the spatial and temporal gradients of the flow map, i.e., a dense path line integration is required. We demonstrate the high accuracy of ou...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: TVCG
• Authors: Tino Weinkauf, Holger Theisel
• Keywords: Path Line, Streak Line Vector, Streak Lines, TVCG 2010