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Lossy compression has been employed to reduce the unprecedented amount of data produced by today's large-scale scientific simulations and high-resolution instruments. To avoid loss of critical information, state-of-the-art scientific lossy compressors provide error controls on relatively simple metrics such as absolute error bound. However, preserving these metrics does not translate to the preservation of topological features, such as critical points in vector fields. To address this problem, we investigate how to effectively preserve the sign of determinant in error-controlled lossy compression, as it is an important quantity of interest used for the robust detection of many topological features. Our contribution is three-fold. (1) We develop a generic theory to derive the allowable perturbation for one row of a matrix while preserving its sign of the determinant. As a practical use-case, we apply this theory to preserve critical points in vector fields because critical point detection can be reduced to the result of the point-in-simplex test that purely relies on the sign of determinants. (2) We optimize this algorithm with a speculative compression scheme to allow for high compression ratios and efficiently parallelize it in distributed environments. (3) We perform solid experiments with real-world datasets, demonstrating that our method achieves up to 440% improvements in compression ratios over state-of-the-art lossy compressors when all critical points need to be preserved. Using the parallelization strategies, our method delivers up to 1.25X and 4.38X performance speedup in data writing and reading compared with the vanilla approach without compression.
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Toward Feature-Preserving Vector Field Compression
The objective of this work is to develop error-bounded lossy compression methods to preserve topological features in 2D and 3D vector fields. Specifically, we explore the preservation of critical points in piecewise linear and bilinear vector fields. We define the preservation of critical points as, without any false positive, false negative, or false type in the decompressed data, (1) keeping each critical point in its original cell and (2) retaining the type of each critical point (e.g., saddle and attracting node). The key to our method is to adapt a vertex-wise error bound for each grid point and to compress input data together with the error bound field using a modified lossy compressor. Our compression algorithm can be also embarrassingly parallelized for large data handling and in situ processing. We benchmark our method by comparing it with existing lossy compressors in terms of false positive/negative/type rates, compression ratio, and various vector field visualizations with several scientific applications.
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- PAR ID:
- 10409832
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
- ISSN:
- 1077-2626
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 16
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2022.3214821
