tensor glyph

{{Short description|Visual aid used in mathematics}}

{{technical|date=September 2012}}

In scientific visualization a tensor glyph is an object that can visualize all or most of the nine degrees of freedom, such as acceleration, twist, or shear – of a $3\; \backslash times\; 3$ matrix. It is used for tensor field visualization, where a data-matrix is available at every point in the grid. "Glyphs, or icons, depict multiple data values by mapping them onto the shape, size, orientation, and surface appearance of a base geometric primitive."{{cite web | url=http://www.cs.utah.edu/~gk/papers/vissym04/vissym04kindlmann.pdf | title=Superquadric Tensor Glyphs | work=Joint EUROGRAPHICS – IEEE TCVG Symposium on Visualization (2004) | year=2004 | accessdate=September 1, 2012 | author=Kindlmann, Gordon}} Tensor glyphs are a particular case of multivariate data glyphs.

There are certain types of glyphs that are commonly used:

• Ellipsoid
• Cuboid
• Cylindrical
• Superquadrics

According to Thomas Schultz and Gordon Kindlmann, specific types of tensor fields "play a central role in scientific and biomedical studies as well as in image analysis

and feature-extraction methods."{{cite journal | url=http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~glk/sqd/schultzTVCG10SuperquadricTensorGlyphs.pdf | title=Superquadric Glyphs for Symmetric Second-Order Tensors | author=Schultz, Thomas and Gordon L. Kindlmann | journal=IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics |date=November–December 2010 | volume= 16 | issue= 6 | pages=1595–604| pmid=20975202 | doi=10.1109/TVCG.2010.199 | citeseerx=10.1.1.461.3948 | s2cid=10026004 }}