Strong Euler well-composedness

In this paper, we define a new flavour of well-composedness, called strong Euler well-composedness. In the general setting of regular cell complexes, a regular cell complex of dimension n is strongly Euler well-composed if the Euler characteristic of the link of each boundary cell is 1, which is the Euler characteristic of an $$(n-1)$$ ( n - 1 ) -dimensional ball. Working in the particular setting of cubical complexes canonically associated with $$n$$ n D pictures, we formally prove in this paper that strong Euler well-composedness implies digital well-composedness in any dimension $$n\ge 2$$ n ≥ 2 and that the converse is not true when $$n\ge 4$$ n ≥ 4 .

Improved approximate rips filtrations with shifted integer lattices and cubical complexes

Rips complexes are important structures for analyzing topological features of metric spaces. Unfortunately, generating these complexes is expensive because of a combinatorial explosion in the complex size. For n points in $$\mathbb {R}^d$$ R d , we present a scheme to construct a 2-approximation of the filtration of the Rips complex in the $$L_\infty $$ L ∞ -norm, which extends to a $$2d^{0.25}$$ 2 d 0.25 -approximation in the Euclidean case. The k-skeleton of the resulting approximation has a total size of $$n2^{O(d\log k +d)}$$ n 2 O ( d log k + d ) . The scheme is based on the integer lattice and simplicial complexes based on the barycentric subdivision of the d-cube. We extend our result to use cubical complexes in place of simplicial complexes by introducing cubical maps between complexes. We get the same approximation guarantee as the simplicial case, while reducing the total size of the approximation to only $$n2^{O(d)}$$ n 2 O ( d ) (cubical) cells. There are two novel techniques that we use in this paper. The first is the use of acyclic carriers for proving our approximation result. In our application, these are maps which relate the Rips complex and the approximation in a relatively simple manner and greatly reduce the complexity of showing the approximation guarantee. The second technique is what we refer to as scale balancing, which is a simple trick to improve the approximation ratio under certain conditions.

Topology of random -dimensional cubical complexes

We study a natural model of a random $2$ -dimensional cubical complex which is a subcomplex of an n-dimensional cube, and where every possible square $2$ -face is included independently with probability p. Our main result exhibits a sharp threshold $p=1/2$ for homology vanishing as $n \to \infty $ . This is a $2$ -dimensional analogue of the Burtin and Erdoős–Spencer theorems characterising the connectivity threshold for random graphs on the $1$ -skeleton of the n-dimensional cube. Our main result can also be seen as a cubical counterpart to the Linial–Meshulam theorem for random $2$ -dimensional simplicial complexes. However, the models exhibit strikingly different behaviours. We show that if $p> 1 - \sqrt {1/2} \approx 0.2929$ , then with high probability the fundamental group is a free group with one generator for every maximal $1$ -dimensional face. As a corollary, homology vanishing and simple connectivity have the same threshold, even in the strong ‘hitting time’ sense. This is in contrast with the simplicial case, where the thresholds are far apart. The proof depends on an iterative algorithm for contracting cycles – we show that with high probability, the algorithm rapidly and dramatically simplifies the fundamental group, converging after only a few steps.