CSE 332 - Introduction to Visualization

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General Info:

Instructor: Prof. Klaus Mueller
Office hours: CS 2428 W 2-3 pm (or send email for appointment)

Phone: 632-1524

Email: mueller{remove_this}@cs.sunysb.edu

Grader: TBD

Office hours:

Phone:

Email:

Meeting time and venue:
Psychology A 137, Tu Th 6:50 - 8:10 pm

Summary:

This course discusses the visualization of scientific, medical, engineering, and business data sets. It introduces mechanisms to acquire sampled, computed, or synthetic data and points out methods to transform these symbolic data into the visual. Topics include the classic visualization process; visual perception; image processing; computer graphics fundamentals; volume and surface visualization; methods for visualizing sampled, simulated, and geometric objects; information visualization, visual analytics, and visualization systems. Since graphics boards (GPUs), such as those commonly used in PC computer games, offer great speedups for the visualization graphics, the technology and usage of these boards for these purposes is also discussed.

Crosslisted with ISE 332.

ABET course objectives:

Demonstrate how to transform numerical datasets from science and medicine into understandable visual representations.
Understand issues associated with digital image quality (e.g. sampling artifacts) and algorithms for performing basic image manipulation operations such as filtering, resampling, and intensity transformation.
Investigate methods (including graphical user interfaces) for the visualization of three-dimensional data sets.

Prerequisites:

CSE 219 (Computer Science III); AMS 210 or MAT 211 (Linear Algebra)

Knowledge of C/C++ (will offer a tutorial for Java programmers)

Texts:

Required:

"Real-Time Volume Rendering" by K. Engel, M. Hadwiger, J. Kniss, C. Rezk-Salama, D. Weiskopf, A.K. Peters, 2006 (book website)

For additional reference and on reserve in the Science & Engineering library:

"Information Visualization: Perception for Design" 2nd edition, by Colin Ware, Morgan-Kaufman, 2004.
"Visualization in Medicine" by B. Preim, D. Bartz, Morgan-Kaufman, 2007.
"Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice - Second Edition in C" by J. D. Foley, A. van Dam, S.K. Feiner, J.F. Hughes, Addison-Wesley, 1995.
"Visualization Toolkit" by W. Schroeder, K. Martin, and W. Lorensen, 2nd ed., Prentice Hall, 1998.
"Digital Image Processing" by R. Gonzales and R. Wood, Prentice-Hall, 2002.
"The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" by E. Tufte, Graphics Press, 1983.
"Envisioning Information" by E. Tufte, Graphics Press, 1990.
"Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative" by E. Tufte, Graphics Press, 1997.

Grading:

Lab assignments: 30%

Midterm: 30%

Final: 40%

Lab assignments:

There will be four labs. You will be using C/C++, FLTK (Fast Light Toolkit, a platform-independent GUI builder), and OpenGL (a popular graphics API). You will have the choice of implementing the labs on the CPU (software) or the GPU (accelerated by graphics hardware). The labs are designed to give you a good exposure to standard programming practices and techniques in general graphics as well as in volume visualization:

In the first lab, you will get acquainted with FLTK and generate a useful GUI (Graphical User Interface) that embeds some basic image processing functionalities.
In the second lab, you will write a basic volume visualization program, which uses the GUI
In the third lab, you will extend your visualization program to perform general volume rendering with lighting effects.
In the fourth lab, you will write a program for the visualization of high-dimensional data, that is, data items with many attrributes.