A Variance based FTLE like Method for Uncertain Vector Fields

Dominic Schneider, Wieland Reich and Gerik Scheuermann

Abstract: We present a novel approach to obtain FTLE-like structures and visualizations for uncertain vector fields. For this, we compute the flow map for a certain time interval now mapping to particle distributions rather than single positions. Our method comprises a variance-based analysis to measure the maximal stretching of the distributions thereby obtaining FTLE-like structures for uncertain vector fields. In the case of ordinary vector fields, the results are visually almost identical to FTLE. We analyze our method in the presence of errors by applying it to a number of synthetic and real world datasets.