No Arabic abstract
In this work we study the framework of mathematical morphology on simplicial complex spaces. Simplicial complexes are widely used to represent multidimensional data, such as meshes, that are two dimensional complexes, or graphs, that can be interpreted as one dimensional complexes. Mathematical morphology is one of the most powerful frameworks for image processing, including the processing of digital structures, and is heavily used for many applications. However, mathematical morphology operators on simplicial complex spaces is not a concept fully developed in the literature. Specifically, we explore properties of the dimensional operators, small, versatile operators that can be used to define new operators on simplicial complexes, while maintaining properties from mathematical morphology. These operators can also be used to recover many morphological operators from the literature. Matlab code and additional material, including the proofs of the original properties, are freely available at url{https://code.google.com/p/math-morpho-simplicial-complexes.}
We present the `Basic S* algorithm for computing shortest path through a metric simplicial complex. In particular, given a metric graph, $G$, which is constructed as a discrete representation of an underlying configuration space (a larger continuous space/manifold typically of dimension greater than one), we consider the Rips complex, $mathcal{R}(G)$, associated with it. Such a complex, and hence shortest paths in it, represent the underlying metric space more closely than what the graph does. While discrete graph representations of continuous spaces is convenient for motion planning in configuration spaces of robotic systems, the metric induced in them by the ambient configuration space is significantly different from the metric of the configuration space itself. We remedy this problem using the simplicial complex representation. Our algorithm requires only an abstract graph, $G=(V,E)$, and a cost/length function, $d:Erightarrow mathbb{R}_+$, as inputs, and no global information such as an embedding or a global coordinate chart is required. The complexity of the Basic S* algorithm is comparable to that of Dijkstras search, but, as the results presented in this paper demonstrate, the shortest paths obtained using the proposed algorithm represent/approximate the geodesic paths in the original metric space significantly more closely.
We provide a random simplicial complex by applying standard constructions to a Poisson point process in Euclidean space. It is gigantic in the sense that - up to homotopy equivalence - it almost surely contains infinitely many copies of every compact topological manifold, both in isolation and in percolation.
There have been several recent articles studying homology of various types of random simplicial complexes. Several theorems have concerned thresholds for vanishing of homology, and in some cases expectations of the Betti numbers. However little seems known so far about limiting distributions of random Betti numbers. In this article we establish Poisson and normal approximation theorems for Betti numbers of different kinds of random simplicial complex: ErdH{o}s-Renyi random clique complexes, random Vietoris-Rips complexes, and random v{C}ech complexes. These results may be of practical interest in topological data analysis.
We correct the proofs of the main theorems in our paper Limit theorems for Betti numbers of random simplicial complexes.
We consider high dimensional variants of the maximum flow and minimum cut problems in the setting of simplicial complexes and provide both algorithmic and hardness results. By viewing flows and cuts topologically in terms of the simplicial (co)boundary operator we can state these problems as linear programs and show that they are dual to one another. Unlike graphs, complexes with integral capacity constraints may have fractional max-flows. We show that computing a maximum integral flow is NP-hard. Moreover, we give a combinatorial definition of a simplicial cut that seems more natural in the context of optimization problems and show that computing such a cut is NP-hard. However, we provide conditions on the simplicial complex for when the cut found by the linear program is a combinatorial cut. For $d$-dimensional simplicial complexes embedded into $mathbb{R}^{d+1}$ we provide algorithms operating on the dual graph: computing a maximum flow is dual to computing a shortest path and computing a minimum cut is dual to computing a minimum cost circulation. Finally, we investigate the Ford-Fulkerson algorithm on simplicial complexes, prove its correctness, and provide a heuristic which guarantees it to halt.