Modeling and simplifying morse complexes in arbitrary dimensions

Abstract

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011. Ascending and descending Morse complexes, defined by a scalar function f over a manifold domain M, decompose M into regions of influence of the critical points of f, thus representing the morphology of the scalar function f over M in a compact way. Here, we introduce two simplification operators on Morse complexes which work in arbitrary dimensions and we discuss their interpretation as n-dimensional Euler operators. We consider a dual representation of the two Morse complexes in terms of an incidence graph and we describe how our simplification operators affect the graph representation. This provides the basis for defining a multi-scale graph-based model of Morse complexes in arbitrary dimensions.