• IDL is a language specifically designed for visualizing large and complex datasets. You can easily and quickly create powerful visualizations, including simple 2D plots and image displays, interactive 3D graphics designed to take advantage of OpenGL hardware acceleration and volume displays designed to take advantage of multiple processors for rapid rendering.
• IDL gives you the flexibility to choose from two different graphics subsystems depending on your needs - Direct Graphics and Object Graphics. See the section on Graphics Subsystems below for more information.

Click on the data visualization categories below for more information.

Graphics Subsystems

The Direct Graphics system draws directly to the current device, whether that is the screen, printer or a postscript file. Graphics created in this way are generally static, but are drawn very quickly. There is very little overhead, and you can easily execute Direct Graphics commands on the fly from the IDL command line. Direct Graphics are ideal for ad hoc, interactive data analysis.
The Object Graphics system in IDL takes advantage of OpenGL for accelerated hardware rendering. There is no concept of a current device. Instead, graphics are rendered as true, 3-dimensional objects that persist in memory. There is more overhead associated with Object Graphics, but using this system enables you to more easily interact with your visualizations for more advanced interpretation. The Intelligent Tools (iTools) are powerful pre-built utilities for interactive data visualization and analysis built on top of the Object Graphics system.

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2D Plots

Simple 2D plots are often key to communicating and interpreting the messages in data. IDL's tools for 2D plotting allow you to easily create custom line plots, scatter plots, log-log and semi-log plots, polar plots, bar plots and date/time plots. Add error bars, multiple axes and multiple datasets with IDL's flexible plotting routines. Control the presentation quality of your plots though fonts, symbols, colors and line styles.

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Images and Image Cubes

• Use IDL's powerful environment for image processing and display to apply color tables to grayscale images, find subtle features, collect statistics on regions of interest, overlay vector data or zoom and pan through large TrueColor displays.

• Image processing has always been a core strength of IDL. From basic image processing techniques such as smoothing, sharpening and contrast enhancement to more advanced functionality such as edge detection, morphological operations and the discrete wavelet transform, IDL gives you all the tools you need to get information out of images.

• Data in IDL are not forced to the highest possible precision, as in some high level languages. Images that are stored as byte type remain 8-bit data and are not converted unnecessarily to 64-bit double precision. This keeps image processing in IDL nimble and optimizes performance.

• For a complete, commercial image processing package for remote sensing, see ENVI, the Environment for Visualizing Images. ENVI is a point-and-click application built in IDL that can be extended with user-supplied functions.

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Contours

IDL has the functionality you expect from a sophisticated contouring package. Grid and contour your scattered data, even with faults or breaklines defined. Create filled and labeled contours and contours with closed boundaries. Plot contours over image displays, geographic projections and 3-dimensional data terrains.

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Vector Fields

Create vector flow diagrams and 3D hedgehog displays with your vector data in IDL. Display isocontours and ribbon streamlines from vector data in 3D.

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Global Mapping

IDL integrates the USGS General Cartographic Transformation Package to provide over 30 map projection types for displaying geospatial data. IDL also includes both a low and a high-resolution database of vector coastlines, rivers and political boundaries. Warp image data and contour plots to a chosen map projection. Overlay gridlines, lines and text, ESRI shape files and other vector data on geographic data.

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Surfaces, Polygonal Meshes and 3D Plots

• View and interactively manipulate surfaces plots, 3D line and scatter plots and complex 3D objects.

• Control the lighting and shading applied to surfaces and 3D scenes.

• Drape images onto 3D surfaces and objects through high-resolution texture mapping.

• Use auxiliary data to color a 3D surface or object through vertex coloring.

• Grid scattered surface data or display triangulated irregular networks (TINs).

• Data of any geometry can be displayed as a polygonal mesh.

• Import and display DXF objects and attributes in IDL.

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Volume Rendering & Tetrahedral Meshes

• Interactively slice and dice powerful visualizations of volumetric data in IDL with convenient GUI tools.

• Directly render 3-dimensional arrays, not just polygonal shells, with true volume rendering in IDL.

• Control the quality and speed of volume rendering in IDL through powerful options over interpolation methods, blending algorithms, Euclidean distance map acceleration and the use of multiple threads of execution on multi-processor systems.

• Define lighting models and apply color and opacity lookup tables to enhance structures in rendered volumes.

• Grid scattered 3-dimensional data or maintain non-rectilinear geometries by displaying tetrahedral meshes. Easily calculate the surface area and volume of a tetrahedral mesh.

• Extract isosurfaces and interval volumes from volume and tetrahedral data. Interval volumes are 3-dimensional subvolumes defined by minimum and maximum data values.

• Visualize streamline ribbons in vector volumes.

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Animations

• Create flipbook animations by collecting images in an IDL animation viewer. The animation frames can include the contents of any window grabbed as an image.

• Animate any visualization by varying the data or the properties of graphic objects. Take advantage of OpenGL hardware acceleration for fast rendering.

• Create stunning fly-throughs of virtual terrains with high-resolution texture mapping.

• Share your IDL animations in the MPEG format.

For information on additional data visualization capabilities, see the IDL Functional Summary.

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