A Numerical Imaging Approach to Comparative Visualization

Numerical simulation is now an acceptable mode of inquiry into a wide range of physical phenomena. As computational methods and hardware continue to advance, it is often the case that older, legacy applications no longer implement the best technology for solving a problem and must be updated. Once modified, these applications need to be extensively studied to ensure that they retain the important characteristics of the original application (accuracy, convergence, etc.). Furthermore, as experimental techniques continue to advance, it is possible to extensively validate existing numerical simulation applications with more accurate physical measurements. Side-by-side comparison and juxtaposition facilitate visual verification of verisimilitude. However in many applications the datasets are too large and complex, and visualization techniques too complex or ill-understood, to rely solely on visual verification. In the present work a quantitative, computable metric is proposed which incorpor..