SemSeg - 4D Space-Time Topology for Semantic Flow Segmentation

The thorough analysis of flows plays an important role in many different processes, such as airplane and car design, environmental research, and medicine. Scientific Visualization and its subfield flow visualization have provided a variety of techniques for the domain experts to visually analyze large and complex flow data sets. Among them, so-called topological methods play an important role.

Vector field topology (VFT) is a mathematically rigorous theory that reveals the essential structure of a static vector field. However, this approach is only fully valid for static vector fields. Recent developments in the target domains of this project show a clear transition from steady to unsteady flow scenarios. Accordingly, we have to see that the traditionally proven approaches do not apply anymore and that a conceptual change in the methodology of visual analysis is necessary. Topological methods which account for the complete dynamic behaviour of flow fields are strongly needed but do not exist. Steps toward this goal have been done from several sides, delivering prom-ising but yet only partial results. It is the objective of this project to research a new segmentation method for unsteady flows that has the elegance and specificity of (steady) VFT, but which provides correct results for unsteady flows as well.