A Survey of Multivariate Spatial Data Visualization

Multivariate spatial data visualization plays an important role in the fields of computing fluid dynamics, combustion simulation, medical imaging and meteorological simulation.It seeks to express and represent the multiple attributes as well as the relationships among them, and help users understand the characteristics and evolving patterns hidden in the datasets in an intuitive way.This paper introduces the concepts of multivariate data and differences from conventional spatial data first, and then clarifies the visualization pipeline of multivariate spatial datasets with a summary of existing works on two aspects:the representation and analysis of multivariate data fields, the visualization and interaction of multivariate data fields.Potential research topics are also discussed.