A metric for the evaluation of dense vector field visualizations

In this work, we present an intuitive image-quality metric that is derived from the motivation of DVF visualization. It utilizes the features of the resulting image and effectively measures the similarity between the output of the visualization method and the input flow data. We use the angle between the gradient direction and the original vector field as a measure of such similarity and the gradient magnitude as an importance measure. Our metric enables the automatic evaluation of images for a given vector field and allows the comparison of different methods, parameters sets, and quality improvement strategies for a specific vector field. By integrating the metric into the image-computation process, our approach can be used to generate improved images by choosing the best parameter set. To verify the effectiveness of our method, we conducted an extensive user study that demonstrated the metric’s applicability to various situations. For instance, our approach elucidated the robustness of a DVF visualization in the presence of data-altering filters, such as resampling.