Tensor field has been widely used in various applications, such as medical imaging, industrial manufacturing, high-dimensional data analysis, and so forth. However, it is a challenging task to understand tensor field intuitively. Therefore, tensor field visualization has become an important research topic. In this survey, we present a comprehensive survey for two kinds of visualization methods for tensor fields: glyphs and streamlines. For glyphs, the eigenvalues of tensor fields will be used to classify existing visualization methods. There are mainly three types of eigenvalues: diffusion tensor fields with all positive real eigenvalues; the tensor field with negative real eigenvalues; the tensor field with imaginary eigenvalues. The methods showing the difference between two tensors (glyphs) are also introduced. For streamlines, there are mainly three important issues: the selection of seed points (streamlines), interpolation of tensor fields, the singularity problem around isotropic tensors. Finally, we discuss challenges and open questions for future studies.
Graphical abstract