MAGIC: M arching Cubes Isosurface Uncertainty Visualization for G auss i an Uncertain Data With Spatial C orrelation

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Authors: Tushar M. Athawale, Kenneth Moreland, David Pugmire, Chris R. Johnson, Paul Rosen, Matthew Ross Norman, Antigoni Georgiadou, Alireza Entezari
Cited by: 0
References: 74

Abstract

In this paper, we study the propagation of data uncertainty through the marching cubes algorithm for isosurface visualization for correlated uncertain data. Consideration of correlation has been shown paramount for avoiding errors in uncertainty quantification and visualization in multiple prior studies. Although the problem of isosurface uncertainty with spatial data correlation has been previously addressed, there are two major limitations to prior treatments. First, there are no analytical formulations for uncertainty quantification of isosurfaces when the data uncertainty is characterized by a Gaussian distribution with spatial correlation. Second, as a consequence of the lack of analytical formulations, existing techniques resort to a Monte Carlo sampling approach, which is expensive and difficult to integrate into visualization tools. To address these limitations, we present a closed-form framework to efficiently derive uncertainty in marching cubes level-sets for Gaussian uncertain data with spatial correlation (MAGIC). To derive closed-form solutions, we leverage the Hinkley's derivation on the ratio of Gaussian distributions. With our analytical framework, we achieve a significant speed-up and enhanced accuracy of uncertainty quantification over classical Monte Carlo methods. We further accelerate our analytical solutions using many-core processors to achieve speed-ups up to $\text{585} \times$585× and integrability with production visualization tools for broader impact. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our correlation-aware uncertainty framework through experiments on meteorology, urban flow, and astrophysics simulation datasets.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Computer Graphics and Visualization Techniques Data Visualization and Analytics Advanced Numerical Analysis Techniques

Publication details

Journal / source
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
Volume
32
Issue
7
Pages
4987–5002
Publication date
14 January 2026
Language
EN