Multimodal Visualization and Analysis of Spectral and Scalar Data

Abstract

An increasing number of industrial applications demand a comprehensive analysis of both structural and chemical composition. Typically, non-destructive testing techniques focus on either structural or chemical characterization but do not deliver both. 3D X-Ray Computed Tomography (XCT) scans are well-suited for determining the internal and external structure of an object at high resolution. The attenuation value it delivers can however be the same or very similar for different materials. For a detailed chemical analysis XCT is therefore combined with spectral characterization techniques such as K-Edge Absorptiometry or X-ray Fluorescence Spectroscopy. In this paper, we are extending a previously introduced framework for visualization and analysis of specimens scanned with these two modalities in multiple ways: For better understanding the dependencies between the spectral energy levels, we propose Spectral Similarity Maps. Spectral Functional Boxplots visualize the statistical distribution of the spectral data. The Spectrum Explorer improves the analysis of specimens of unknown composition. We demonstrate the usefulness of our techniques on several use cases.