Flow Visualization by Near-Regular Texture Synthesis

In this paper, a method is proposed to use the directional information of a near-regular texture to generate a moving texture for animated visualization of a flow field. By the method, we use the patch-based method to synthesize the first frame. To generate the next frame, the four corners of each patch P are moved along the flow to define a new quadrilateral P′. The texture of P is then mapped into P′. We then use a deformation matrix defined by the Jacobian matrix of the mapping from P to P′ to track the degree of deformation of each pixel. When the texture deformation at a pixel is beyond a certain threshold, the pixel will be marked as invalid and re-synthesized. The above step is repeated to generate all subsequent frames in a coherent manner. Besides adding to the variety of flow visualization techniques, our method is also the first capable of synthesizing a moving texture from a near-regular sample texture.