scientific visualization Scientific visualization ( also spelled scientific visualisation) is an interdisciplinary branch of science concerned with the visualization of scientific phenomena. Michael Friendly (2008)"Milestones in the history of thematic cartography, st ...

a tensor glyph is an object that can visualize all or most of the nine degrees of freedom, such as

acceleration In mechanics, acceleration is the rate of change of the velocity of an object with respect to time. Accelerations are vector quantities (in that they have magnitude and direction). The orientation of an object's acceleration is given by ...

, twist, or shear – of a

3 \times 3

matrix. It is used for

tensor field In mathematics and physics, a tensor field assigns a tensor to each point of a mathematical space (typically a Euclidean space or manifold). Tensor fields are used in differential geometry, algebraic geometry, general relativity, in the analys ...

visualization, where a data-matrix is available at every point in the grid. "Glyphs, or icons, depict multiple data values by mapping them onto the shape, size, orientation, and surface appearance of a base geometric primitive." Tensor glyphs are a particular case of multivariate data

glyphs A glyph () is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A g ...

. There are certain types of glyphs that are commonly used: * Ellipsoid * Cuboid * Cylindrical *

Superquadrics In mathematics, the superquadrics or super-quadrics (also superquadratics) are a family of geometric shapes defined by formulas that resemble those of ellipsoids and other quadrics, except that the squaring operations are replaced by arbitrary p ...

According to Thomas Schultz and

Gordon Kindlmann Gordon L. Kindlmann is an American computer scientist who works on information visualization and image analysis. He is recognized for his contributions in developing tools for tensor data visualization. Biography Gordon Kindlmann graduated from ...

, specific types of tensor fields "play a central role in scientific and biomedical studies as well as in image analysis and feature-extraction methods."

References

Further reading