Abstract: Line integral convolution(LIC)is a method for vector field visualization．This paper presented an improved LIC technique for 2D vector field．Firstly,focused on the problem that some vector field’s magnitude is too similar in regions of interest,we used nonlinear color mapping method to deal with it,and the final visualization result can highlight the vector field’s characteristics in regions of interest．Secondly,we extracted four parallel sub-modules from the original LIC serial computing tasks and implemented color enhanced LIC’s hardware acceleration relying on NVIDIA’s CUDA architecture．The results show that,with the increase of the input vector fields’ resolution,the speed of the accelera-ted algorithm increases as well．Therefore,the accelerated algorithm implemented in this paper can be well applied to interactive visualization of high-resolution 2D vector fields,and it has a good versatility,demanding no high hardware requirements．To conclude,the new method can improve visual quality with better performance.

Key words: Vector field visualization,Line integral convolution,Color enhancing,GPU acceleration