FeatureLego: Volume Exploration Using Exhaustive Clustering of Super-Voxels
This addresses volume exploration for users in fields like medical imaging or scientific visualization, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing clustering methods with efficiency improvements.
The paper tackles the problem of efficiently selecting semantic features in volume exploration by introducing FeatureLego, a framework that uses exhaustive clustering of super-voxels to capture boundaries and enable hierarchical exploration, showing effectiveness on multiple real-world datasets.
We present a volume exploration framework, FeatureLego, that uses a novel voxel clustering approach for efficient selection of semantic features. We partition the input volume into a set of compact super-voxels that represent the finest selection granularity. We then perform an exhaustive clustering of these super-voxels using a graph-based clustering method. Unlike the prevalent brute-force parameter sampling approaches, we propose an efficient algorithm to perform this exhaustive clustering. By computing an exhaustive set of clusters, we aim to capture as many boundaries as possible and ensure that the user has sufficient options for efficiently selecting semantically relevant features. Furthermore, we merge all the computed clusters into a single tree of meta-clusters that can be used for hierarchical exploration. We implement an intuitive user-interface to interactively explore volumes using our clustering approach. Finally, we show the effectiveness of our framework on multiple real-world datasets of different modalities.