Data Visualization : Principles and Practice, Second Edition

This book explores the study of processing and visually representing data sets. Data visualization is closely related to information graphics, information visualization, scientific visualization, and statistical graphics. This second edition presents a better treatment of the relationship between traditional scientific visualization and information visualization, a description of the emerging field of visual analytics, and updated techniques using the GPU and new generations of software tools and packages. This edition is also enhanced with exercises and downloadable code and data sets.

Designing a complete visualization system involves many subtle decisions. When designing a complex, real-world visualization system, such decisions involve many types of constraints, such as performance, platform (in)dependence, available programming languages and styles, user-interface toolkits, input/output data format constraints, integration with third-party code, and more.

Focusing on those techniques and methods with the broadest applicability across fields, the second edition of Data Visualization: Principles and Practice provides a streamlined introduction to various visualization techniques. The book illustrates a wide variety of applications of data visualizations, illustrating the range of problems that can be tackled by such methods, and emphasizes the strong connections between visualization and related disciplines such as imaging and computer graphics. It covers a wide range of sub-topics in data visualization: data representation; visualization of scalar, vector, tensor, and volumetric data; image processing and domain modeling techniques; and information visualization.

See What’s New in the Second Edition:

• Additional visualization algorithms and techniques
• New examples of combined techniques for diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) visualization, illustrative fiber track rendering, and fiber bundling techniques
• Additional techniques for point-cloud reconstruction
• Additional advanced image segmentation algorithms
• Several important software systems and libraries

Algorithmic and software design issues are illustrated throughout by (pseudo)code fragments written in the C++ programming language. Exercises covering the topics discussed in the book, as well as datasets and source code, are also provided as additional online resources.