A Practical Approach to Morse-Smale Complex Computation: Scalability and Generality

The Morse-Smale (MS) complex has proven to be a useful tool in extracting and visualizing features from scalar-valued data. However, efficient computation of the MS complex for large scale data remains a challenging problem. We describe a new algorithm and easily extensible framework for computing MS complexes for large scale data of any dimension where scalar values are given at the vertices of a closure-finite and weak topology (CW) complex, therefore enabling computation on a wide variety of meshes such as regular grids, simplicial meshes, and adaptive multiresolution (AMR) meshes. A new divide-and-conquer strategy allows for memory-efficient computation of the MS complex and simplification on-the-fly to control the size of the output. In addition to being able to handle various data formats, the framework supports implementation-specific optimizations, for example, for regular data. We present the complete characterization of critical point cancellations in all dimensions. This tec...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: VIS
• Authors: Attila Gyulassy, Peer-Timo Bremer, Bernd Hamann, Valerio Pascucci
• Keywords: IEEE Visualization, Large Scale Data, Memory-efficient Computation, MS Complex, VIS 2008, Visualization