99 research outputs found
Generalized topological simplification of scalar fields on surfaces
pre-printWe present a combinatorial algorithm for the general topological simplification of scalar fields on surfaces. Given a scalar field f, our algorithm generates a simplified field g that provably admits only critical points from a constrained subset of the singularities of f, while guaranteeing a small distance ||f - g||∞ for data-fitting purpose. In contrast to previous algorithms, our approach is oblivious to the strategy used for selecting features of interest and allows critical points to be removed arbitrarily. When topological persistence is used to select the features of interest, our algorithm produces a standard ϵ-simplification. Our approach is based on a new iterative algorithm for the constrained reconstruction of sub- and sur-level sets. Extensive experiments show that the number of iterations required for our algorithm to converge is rarely greater than 2 and never greater than 5, yielding O(n log(n)) practical time performances. The algorithm handles triangulated surfaces with or without boundary and is robust to the presence of multi-saddles in the input. It is simple to implement, fast in practice and more general than previous techniques. Practically, our approach allows a user to arbitrarily simplify the topology of an input function and robustly generate the corresponding simplified function. An appealing application area of our algorithm is in scalar field design since it enables, without any threshold parameter, the robust pruning of topological noise as selected by the user. This is needed for example to get rid of inaccuracies introduced by numerical solvers, thereby providing topological guarantees needed for certified geometry processing. Experiments show this ability to eliminate numerical noise as well as validate the time efficiency and accuracy of our algorithm. We provide a lightweight C++ implementation as supplemental material that can be used for topological cleaning on surface meshes
Wasserstein Auto-Encoders of Merge Trees (and Persistence Diagrams)
This paper presents a computational framework for the Wasserstein
auto-encoding of merge trees (MT-WAE), a novel extension of the classical
auto-encoder neural network architecture to the Wasserstein metric space of
merge trees. In contrast to traditional auto-encoders which operate on
vectorized data, our formulation explicitly manipulates merge trees on their
associated metric space at each layer of the network, resulting in superior
accuracy and interpretability. Our novel neural network approach can be
interpreted as a non-linear generalization of previous linear attempts [79] at
merge tree encoding. It also trivially extends to persistence diagrams.
Extensive experiments on public ensembles demonstrate the efficiency of our
algorithms, with MT-WAE computations in the orders of minutes on average. We
show the utility of our contributions in two applications adapted from previous
work on merge tree encoding [79]. First, we apply MT-WAE to merge tree
compression, by concisely representing them with their coordinates in the final
layer of our auto-encoder. Second, we document an application to dimensionality
reduction, by exploiting the latent space of our auto-encoder, for the visual
analysis of ensemble data. We illustrate the versatility of our framework by
introducing two penalty terms, to help preserve in the latent space both the
Wasserstein distances between merge trees, as well as their clusters. In both
applications, quantitative experiments assess the relevance of our framework.
Finally, we provide a C++ implementation that can be used for reproducibility.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2207.1096
Task-based Augmented Reeb Graphs with Dynamic ST-Trees
International audienceThis paper presents, to the best of our knowledge, the first parallel algorithm for the computation of the augmented Reeb graph of piecewise linear scalar data. Such augmented Reeb graphs have a wide range of applications , including contour seeding and feature based segmentation. Our approach targets shared-memory multi-core workstations. For this, it completely revisits the optimal, but sequential, Reeb graph algorithm, which is capable of handing data in arbitrary dimension and with optimal time complexity. We take advantage of Fibonacci heaps to exploit the ST-Tree data structure through independent local propagations, while maintaining the optimal, linearithmic time complexity of the sequential reference algorithm. These independent propagations can be expressed using OpenMP tasks, hence benefiting in parallel from the dynamic load balancing of the task runtime while enabling us to increase the parallelism degree thanks to a dual sweep. We present performance results on triangulated surfaces and tetrahedral meshes. We provide comparisons to related work and show that our new algorithm results in superior time performance in practice, both in sequential and in parallel. An open-source C++ implementation is provided for reproducibility
Principal Geodesic Analysis of Merge Trees (and Persistence Diagrams)
This paper presents a computational framework for the Principal Geodesic
Analysis of merge trees (MT-PGA), a novel adaptation of the celebrated
Principal Component Analysis (PCA) framework [87] to the Wasserstein metric
space of merge trees [92]. We formulate MT-PGA computation as a constrained
optimization problem, aiming at adjusting a basis of orthogonal geodesic axes,
while minimizing a fitting energy. We introduce an efficient, iterative
algorithm which exploits shared-memory parallelism, as well as an analytic
expression of the fitting energy gradient, to ensure fast iterations. Our
approach also trivially extends to extremum persistence diagrams. Extensive
experiments on public ensembles demonstrate the efficiency of our approach -
with MT-PGA computations in the orders of minutes for the largest examples. We
show the utility of our contributions by extending to merge trees two typical
PCA applications. First, we apply MT-PGA to data reduction and reliably
compress merge trees by concisely representing them by their first coordinates
in the MT-PGA basis. Second, we present a dimensionality reduction framework
exploiting the first two directions of the MT-PGA basis to generate
two-dimensional layouts of the ensemble. We augment these layouts with
persistence correlation views, enabling global and local visual inspections of
the feature variability in the ensemble. In both applications, quantitative
experiments assess the relevance of our framework. Finally, we provide a
lightweight C++ implementation that can be used to reproduce our results
Progressive Wasserstein Barycenters of Persistence Diagrams
This paper presents an efficient algorithm for the progressive approximation
of Wasserstein barycenters of persistence diagrams, with applications to the
visual analysis of ensemble data. Given a set of scalar fields, our approach
enables the computation of a persistence diagram which is representative of the
set, and which visually conveys the number, data ranges and saliences of the
main features of interest found in the set. Such representative diagrams are
obtained by computing explicitly the discrete Wasserstein barycenter of the set
of persistence diagrams, a notoriously computationally intensive task. In
particular, we revisit efficient algorithms for Wasserstein distance
approximation [12,51] to extend previous work on barycenter estimation [94]. We
present a new fast algorithm, which progressively approximates the barycenter
by iteratively increasing the computation accuracy as well as the number of
persistent features in the output diagram. Such a progressivity drastically
improves convergence in practice and allows to design an interruptible
algorithm, capable of respecting computation time constraints. This enables the
approximation of Wasserstein barycenters within interactive times. We present
an application to ensemble clustering where we revisit the k-means algorithm to
exploit our barycenters and compute, within execution time constraints,
meaningful clusters of ensemble data along with their barycenter diagram.
Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-life data sets report that our
algorithm converges to barycenters that are qualitatively meaningful with
regard to the applications, and quantitatively comparable to previous
techniques, while offering an order of magnitude speedup when run until
convergence (without time constraint). Our algorithm can be trivially
parallelized to provide additional speedups in practice on standard
workstations. [...
The Topology ToolKit
This system paper presents the Topology ToolKit (TTK), a software platform
designed for topological data analysis in scientific visualization. TTK
provides a unified, generic, efficient, and robust implementation of key
algorithms for the topological analysis of scalar data, including: critical
points, integral lines, persistence diagrams, persistence curves, merge trees,
contour trees, Morse-Smale complexes, fiber surfaces, continuous scatterplots,
Jacobi sets, Reeb spaces, and more. TTK is easily accessible to end users due
to a tight integration with ParaView. It is also easily accessible to
developers through a variety of bindings (Python, VTK/C++) for fast prototyping
or through direct, dependence-free, C++, to ease integration into pre-existing
complex systems. While developing TTK, we faced several algorithmic and
software engineering challenges, which we document in this paper. In
particular, we present an algorithm for the construction of a discrete gradient
that complies to the critical points extracted in the piecewise-linear setting.
This algorithm guarantees a combinatorial consistency across the topological
abstractions supported by TTK, and importantly, a unified implementation of
topological data simplification for multi-scale exploration and analysis. We
also present a cached triangulation data structure, that supports time
efficient and generic traversals, which self-adjusts its memory usage on demand
for input simplicial meshes and which implicitly emulates a triangulation for
regular grids with no memory overhead. Finally, we describe an original
software architecture, which guarantees memory efficient and direct accesses to
TTK features, while still allowing for researchers powerful and easy bindings
and extensions. TTK is open source (BSD license) and its code, online
documentation and video tutorials are available on TTK's website
Statistical Parameter Selection for Clustering Persistence Diagrams
International audienceIn urgent decision making applications, ensemble simulations are an important way to determine different outcome scenarios based on currently available data. In this paper, we will analyze the output of ensemble simulations by considering so-called persistence diagrams, which are reduced representations of the original data, motivated by the extraction of topological features. Based on a recently published progressive algorithm for the clustering of persistence diagrams, we determine the optimal number of clusters, and therefore the number of significantly different outcome scenarios, by the minimization of established statistical score functions. Furthermore, we present a proof-of-concept prototype implementation of the statistical selection of the number of clusters and provide the results of an experimental study, where this implementation has been applied to real-world ensemble data sets
Lifted Wasserstein Matcher for Fast and Robust Topology Tracking
This paper presents a robust and efficient method for tracking topological
features in time-varying scalar data. Structures are tracked based on the
optimal matching between persistence diagrams with respect to the Wasserstein
metric. This fundamentally relies on solving the assignment problem, a special
case of optimal transport, for all consecutive timesteps. Our approach relies
on two main contributions. First, we revisit the seminal assignment algorithm
by Kuhn and Munkres which we specifically adapt to the problem of matching
persistence diagrams in an efficient way. Second, we propose an extension of
the Wasserstein metric that significantly improves the geometrical stability of
the matching of domain-embedded persistence pairs. We show that this
geometrical lifting has the additional positive side-effect of improving the
assignment matrix sparsity and therefore computing time. The global framework
implements a coarse-grained parallelism by computing persistence diagrams and
finding optimal matchings in parallel for every couple of consecutive
timesteps. Critical trajectories are constructed by associating successively
matched persistence pairs over time. Merging and splitting events are detected
with a geometrical threshold in a post-processing stage. Extensive experiments
on real-life datasets show that our matching approach is an order of magnitude
faster than the seminal Munkres algorithm. Moreover, compared to a modern
approximation method, our method provides competitive runtimes while yielding
exact results. We demonstrate the utility of our global framework by extracting
critical point trajectories from various simulated time-varying datasets and
compare it to the existing methods based on associated overlaps of volumes.
Robustness to noise and temporal resolution downsampling is empirically
demonstrated
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