Vines and Vineyards by Updating Persistence in Linear Time
SoCG'06 version (© ACM 2006)
Abstract
Persistent homology is the mathematical core of recent work on
shape, including reconstruction, recognition, and matching. Its pertinent
information is encapsulated by a pairing of the critical values
of a function, visualized by points forming a diagram in the plane.
The original algorithm in [10] computes the pairs from an ordering
of the simplices in a triangulation and takes worst-case time cubic
in the number of simplices. The main result of this paper is an
algorithm that maintains the pairing in worst-case linear time per
transposition in the ordering. A side-effect of the algorithm's analysis
is an elementary proof of the stability of persistence diagrams
[7] in the special case of piecewise-linear functions. We use the
algorithm to compute 1-parameter families of diagrams which we
apply to the study of protein folding trajectories.