CSE 564 - Visualization

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General Info:

Instructor: Prof. Klaus Mueller

Office hours: CS 2428, We 2-3pm (or send email for other arrangements)

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:

The course emphasizes a hands-on approach to scientific, medical, and information visualization, and visual analytics. Topics include: traditional visualization techniques, the visualization process, visual perception and cognition, basic graphics and imaging concepts, volume and surface visualization, volume graphics, visualization of sampled, observed, and computed data, flow and vector field visualization. information visualization, and the coupling of intelligent computing with visualization (visual analytics). This course presents introductory as well as more advanced topics on visualization, and students will have the opportunity to further explore a topic of their choice by ways of a final programming project. GPUs (commodity graphics hardware manufactured by Nvidia and ATI) will be used for all lab assignments to enable interactive image generation, and this course will teach how they are programmed for this purpose.

Be sure to check out the HALL OF FAME 2005 and the HALL OF FAME 2007 that shows some of the images that students in previous years produced for the labs and final project.

Prerequisites:

Graduate standing

Working knowledge of C/C++

Texts:
Required:

Real Time Volume Graphics by K. Engel, M. Hadwiger, J. Kniss, C. Rezk-Salama, and D. Weiskopf (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: 50%

Final Project: 50%

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.

Final Project:

In the final project you may choose among several advanced topics or suggest your own. You will first write a proposal and then keep a log about your activites via a web page. At the end of the semester, you will present your project to the rest of the class and document your findings on the web page.