Hardware-accelerated texture advection for unsteady flow visualization

We present a novel hardware-accelerated texture advection algorithm to visualize the motion of two-dimensional unsteady flows. Making use of several proposed extensions to the OpenGL-1.2 specification, we demonstrate animations of over 65,000 particles at 2 frames/sec on an SGI Octane with EMXI graphics. High image quality is achieved by careful attention to edge effects, noise frequency, and image enhancement. We provide a detailed description of the hardware implementation, including temporal and spatial coherence techniques, dye advection techniques, and feature extraction.