Fast visualization of depth contours using graphics hardware

Abstract

Depth contours are a well-known technique for visualizing the distribution of multidimensional point data sets. We present an image-space algorithm for drawing the depth contours of a set of planar points. The algorithm is an improvement on existing algorithms based on the duality principle from computational geometry, implemented with 3D graphics rendering techniques. Our improvement takes advantage of properties of the dual arrangement of the input point set to significantly reduce the amount of computation, thus is asymptotically faster than its predecessors.