Chapter 5
Scalar Visualization
VISUALIZING scalar data is frequently encountered in science, engineering, and medicine, but also in daily life. Recalling from Section 3.6, scalar datasets, or scalar fields, represent functions f : D → ℝ, where D is usually a subset of ℝ2 or ℝ3. There exist many scalar visualization techniques, both for two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) datasets. In this chapter, we present a number of the most popular scalar visualization techniques: color mapping, contouring, and height plots. We start in Section 5.1 with color mapping and then discuss the design of effective colormaps in Section 5.2. In Section 5.3, we discuss contouring in two and three dimensions. In Section 5.4, we present the height plots. ...
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