A survey of visualization pipelines.

The most common abstraction used by visualization libraries and applications today is what is known as the visualization pipeline. The visualization pipeline provides a mechanism to encapsulate algorithms and then couple them together in a variety of ways. The visualization pipeline has been in existence for over 20 years, and over this time many variations and improvements have been proposed. This paper provides a literature review of the most prevalent features of visualization pipelines and some of the most recent research directions.