Triangulating stratified manifolds I: a reach comparison theorem

In this paper, we define the reach for submanifolds of Riemannian manifolds, in a way that is similar to the Euclidean case. Given a d-dimensional submanifold S of a smooth Riemannian manifold M and a point p ∈ M that is not too far from S we want to give bounds on local feature size of exp −1 p (S). Here exp −1 p is the inverse exponential map, a canonical map from the manifold to the tangent space. Bounds on the local feature size of exp −1 p (S) can be reduced to giving bounds on the reach of exp −1 p (B), where B is a geodesic ball, centred at c with radius equal to the reach of S. Equivalently we can give bounds on the reach of exp −1 p • exp c (B c), where now B c is a ball in the tangent space T c M, with the same radius. To establish bounds on the reach of exp −1 p • exp c (B c) we use bounds on the metric and on its derivative in Riemann normal coordinates. This result is a first step towards answering the important question of how to triangulate stratified manifolds

The topological correctness of PL approximations of isomanifolds

Isomanifolds are the generalization of isosurfaces to arbitrary dimension and codimension, i.e. manifolds defined as the zero set of some multivariate vector-valued smooth function f : Rd → Rd−n. A natural (and efficient) way to approximate an isomanifold is to consider its Piecewise-Linear (PL) approximation based on a triangulation T of the ambient space Rd. In this paper, we give conditions under which the PL-approximation of an isomanifold is topologically equivalent to the isomanifold. The conditions are easy to satisfy in the sense that they can always be met by taking a sufficiently fine triangulation T . This contrasts with previous results on the triangulation of manifolds where, in arbitrary dimensions, delicate perturbations are needed to guarantee topological correctness, which leads to strong limitations in practice. We further give a bound on the Fréchet distance between the original isomanifold and its PL-approximation. Finally we show analogous results for the PL-approximation of an isomanifold with boundary

Trianguler les sous-variétés: une version élémentaire et quantifiée de la méthode de Whitney

International audienceWe quantize Whitney's construction to prove the existence of a triangulation for any C^2 manifold, so that we get an algorithm with explicit bounds. We also give a new elementary proof, which is completely geometric