A Mayer–Vietoris Formula for Persistent Homology with an Application to Shape Recognition in the Presence of Occlusions

  • Authors:
  • Barbara Di Fabio;Claudia Landi

  • Affiliations:
  • Università di Bologna, ARCES, Bologna, Italy;Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Dipartimento di Scienze e Metodi dell’Ingegneria, Reggio Emilia, Italy

  • Venue:
  • Foundations of Computational Mathematics
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

In algebraic topology it is well known that, using the Mayer–Vietoris sequence, the homology of a space X can be studied by splitting X into subspaces A and B and computing the homology of A, B, and A∩B. A natural question is: To what extent does persistent homology benefit from a similar property? In this paper we show that persistent homology has a Mayer–Vietoris sequence that is generally not exact but only of order 2. However, we obtain a Mayer–Vietoris formula involving the ranks of the persistent homology groups of X, A, B, and A∩B plus three extra terms. This implies that persistent homological features of A and B can be found either as persistent homological features of X or of A∩B. As an application of this result, we show that persistence diagrams are able to recognize an occluded shape by showing a common subset of points.