Photographic High-Dynamic-Range Scalar Visualization

Liang Zhou, Marc Rivinius, Chris R. Johnson, Daniel Weiskopf

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics

DOI Paper Supplementary Software (Windows UWP AppPackage)

Abstract

We propose a photographic method to show scalar values of high dynamic range (HDR) by color mapping for 2D visualization. We combine (1) tone-mapping operators that transform the data to the display range of the monitor while preserving perceptually important features, based on a systematic evaluation, and (2) simulated glares that highlight high-value regions. Simulated glares are effective for highlighting small areas (of a few pixels) that may not be visible with conventional visualizations; through a controlled perception study, we confirm that glare is preattentive. The usefulness of our overall photographic HDR visualization is validated through the feedback of expert users.

Photographic HDR scalar visualization of high dynamic densities of bundled flight routes within the United States. Conventional visualizations with transformed color maps for comparison: (b) linear, (c) gamma 1/2.2, and (d) logarithmic mappings. All images use the full range of the same color map—details are shown in the zoom-ins. A gray line is drawn for every 20% of the data value range in each color map to indicate the transformation. For the HDR visualization, glare is applied to pixels with values greater or equal to 40% of the value range. Our new photographic technique (a) highlights regions with large scalar values even if they cover only a few pixels, which are easily missed by any of the existing color mapping approaches. At the same time, we still show the full dynamic range of data values

Visualizations of the New York City taxi data: (a) photographic HDR visualization, (c) linear mapping, (e) gamma mapping, and (g) logarithmic mapping. The corresponding transformed color maps with marks on every 20% are shown in (b), (d), (f), and (h), respectively. The Metropolitan Museum is identified with the contrast-enhanced mode of the magic lens (the bottom right zoom-in in (a)), and four individual hotspots are revealed under the glare over the Penn station with the bright pixel mode (the top left zoom-in in (a)).

The power spectrum of a noisy image (a) is visualized with (b) logarithmic mapping and (c) photographic HDR visualization.

BibTeX


        @ARTICLE{Zhou_tvcg20,
            author={Zhou, Liang and Rivinius, Marc and Johnson, Chris R. and Weiskopf, Daniel},
            journal={IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics}, 
            title={Photographic High-Dynamic-Range Scalar Visualization}, 
            year={2020},
            volume={26},
            number={6},
            pages={2156-2167},
            keywords={Data visualization;Image color analysis;Pipelines;Dynamic range;Visualization;Two dimensional displays;Monitoring;Tone mapping;glare;high dynamic range visualization;2D diagrams},
            doi={10.1109/TVCG.2020.2970522}}