Modeling three-dimensional morse and morse-smale complexes

Abstract

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013. Morse and Morse-Smale complexes have been recognized as a suitable tool for modeling the topology of a manifold M through a decomposition of M induced by a scalar field f defined over M. We consider here the problem of representing, constructing and simplifying Morse and Morse-Smale complexes in 3D. We first describe and compare two data structures for encoding 3D Morse and Morse-Smale complexes. We describe, analyze and compare algorithms for computing such complexes. Finally, we consider the simplification of Morse and Morse-Smale complexes by applying coarsening operators on them, and we discuss and compare the coarsening operators on Morse and Morse-Smale complexes described in the literature.