Contour Chart starting point

10-30-2009 6:01 PM |

I am using the toolkit charting libs and would like to do a contour chart (think a continuous X,Y chart where the datapoint color represents a third value, say height at x,y)

I am thinking about using a scatterseries, but wonder how hard it will be to make sure that the scatterdatapoints are always visually connected to each other in a grid.

 Any other ideas on how to do this?

I also thought about using a bar chart and doing a custom bar style...

Re: Contour Chart starting point

11-02-2009 11:35 AM |

Update:

I did a quick test with using a scatterseries to achieve a contour chart and had two problems:

 1) it looks like the data points for a scatterseries all have to be the same style for a given scatterseries which is not goint to help since I need them to be a custom color based on scatterseries x,y cooridnate

2) the performance is woeful. I did a 43 x 128 contour chart which is only about 10% of the size I would want to be able to do and the scatterseries took 16 seconds to load.

So now I am still left wondering what the best way to do a contour chart in Silverlight.  I am going to try two different directions:

1) doing a bubble series - since it appears to support different datapoints - at least in size

2) creating a bitmap in realtime form my daya and using that as the background for a chart - basically a bitmap with two axis

Any ideas/thoughts are appreciated!!

Re: Contour Chart starting point

11-04-2009 12:36 AM |

Hi,

If you want to present some 3-d data, then Bubble series could be useful, and needn't much code work.

Creating bitmap gives more flexibility, however, you need create chart from the very beginning, writing much code.

I would suggest using bubble chart

Thanks,

Re: Contour Chart starting point

11-05-2009 7:34 PM |

I tried Bubbleseries and scatterSeries and they both slow down dramatically when the number of points > 1000-2000.  For example I created a scatterseries with 128 columns and 43 rows of data and it takes 26 seconds to create the chart.

 I need something that supports at least 10,000 columns x 50 rows.  I have had good success using a WritableBitmap and creating the controur chart this way now I have to make axis, labels, tooltips, etc.

Is there any way to just use the toolkit charting library to do the axis and other chart piece and use a WritableBitmap to display in the chart area?

Re: Re: Contour Chart starting point

11-05-2009 8:21 PM |

I'm very keen on contouring;

let me know how your project progresses.

You may want to look at a non silverlight contouring/segmentation package produced by Kitware based on ITK.

Ultimately, when you start getting into large amounts of data you may

want to switch to another backend, pehaps inserted into a video window.

How much interactivity do you want ?

good luck,

dr. K

Re: Contour Chart starting point

11-06-2009 6:29 PM |

Have had good sucess at using WritableBitmap to do contour section of chart and use the toolkit charting for axis and other bits.

Here is a image of pass 1...

Re: Re: Contour Chart starting point

11-07-2009 1:29 AM |

what is that ?

Re: Re: Contour Chart starting point

11-07-2009 10:58 PM |

This is water velocity in different depth cells across a number of days off the coast of California near San Diego.  the sine wave is the surface.  there are 4800+ profiles, each 10 minutes apart.

Re: Re: Re: Contour Chart starting point

11-08-2009 9:25 AM |

ah, very cool.

i like the technique of using a bitmap when the data gets dense.

but how is it is contour plot ?