Cubical Cohomology Ring of 3D Photographs

Cohomology and cohomology ring of three-dimensional (3D) objects are topological invariants that characterize holes and their relations. Cohomology ring has been traditionally computed on simplicial complexes. Nevertheless, cubical complexes deal directly with the voxels in 3D images, no additional triangulation is necessary, facilitating efficient algorithms for the computation of topological invariants in the image context. In this paper, we present formulas to directly compute the cohomology ring of 3D cubical complexes without making use of any additional triangulation. Starting from a cubical complex $Q$ that represents a 3D binary-valued digital picture whose foreground has one connected component, we compute first the cohomological information on the boundary of the object, $\partial Q$ by an incremental technique; then, using a face reduction algorithm, we compute it on the whole object; finally, applying the mentioned formulas, the cohomology ring is computed from such information

Cups products in Z2-cohomology of 3D polyhedral complexes

Let I=(Z3,26,6,B) be a 3D digital image, let Q(I) be the associated cubical complex and let ∂Q(I) be the subcomplex of Q(I) whose maximal cells are the quadrangles of Q(I) shared by a voxel of B in the foreground -- the object under study -- and by a voxel of Z3∖B in the background -- the ambient space. We show how to simplify the combinatorial structure of ∂Q(I) and obtain a 3D polyhedral complex P(I) homeomorphic to ∂Q(I) but with fewer cells. We introduce an algorithm that computes cup products on H∗(P(I);Z2) directly from the combinatorics. The computational method introduced here can be effectively applied to any polyhedral complex embedded in R3

3D Well-composed Polyhedral Complexes

A binary three-dimensional (3D) image $I$ is well-composed if the boundary surface of its continuous analog is a 2D manifold. Since 3D images are not often well-composed, there are several voxel-based methods ("repairing" algorithms) for turning them into well-composed ones but these methods either do not guarantee the topological equivalence between the original image and its corresponding well-composed one or involve sub-sampling the whole image. In this paper, we present a method to locally "repair" the cubical complex $Q(I)$ (embedded in $\mathbb{R}^3$) associated to $I$ to obtain a polyhedral complex $P(I)$ homotopy equivalent to $Q(I)$ such that the boundary of every connected component of $P(I)$ is a 2D manifold. The reparation is performed via a new codification system for $P(I)$ under the form of a 3D grayscale image that allows an efficient access to cells and their faces