Wavelet compression of vector field visualizations

Flow visualization has been an active research field for several years and streamlines have proved to be an effective representation of two-dimensional steady vector fields. Online simulation of complex dynamic systems, computed on powerful computers, become more and more common. Efficient steering of the computational process requires the analysis of simulation results in real time. Visualization offers the possibility of at-a-glance analysis of the data but requires to be able to download visualizations efficiently. Here we propose a wavelet model and compression scheme for streamline based images of 2D steady vector fields. This method allows us to decrease the size of the data by a factor of 2.5 for a visualization quality comparable to the original image, and the compression factor increases to 10 if we accept small deformations.