Viscous fingers: A topological visual analytics approach

We present a web-based visual analytics framework to visualize viscous fingers that combines particle systems, direct volume rendering, and graphs. In our first step, we apply a Gaussian filter to the particle dataset to obtain a voxel representation for the entire computational domain. Next, we extract and track the viscous fingers using Reeb graphs, where the fingers are treated as level sets above a user-specified salt concentration. We provide linked views to compare, browse, and analyze the ensembles in real time. The major contribution of this technique is an interactive graph which visualizes the evolution of the fingers over time, ie, when fingers are formed, split, merge, and dissolve.