The flow complex: a data structure for geometric modeling

  • Authors:
  • Joachim Giesen;Matthias John

  • Affiliations:
  • Institut für Theoretische Informatik, ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland;Institut für Theoretische Informatik, ETH Züirich, Zürich, Switzerland

  • Venue:
  • SODA '03 Proceedings of the fourteenth annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete algorithms
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

Structuring finite sets of points is at the heart of computational geometry. Such point sets arise naturally in many applications. Examples in R3 are point sets sampled from the surface of a solid or the locations of atoms in a molecule. A first step in processing these point sets is to organize them in some data structure. Structuring a point set into a simplicial complex like the Delaunay triangulation has turned out to be appropriate for many modeling tasks. Here we introduce the flow complex which is another simplicial complex that can be computed efficiently from a finite set of points. The flow complex turned out to be well suited for surface reconstruction from a finite sample and for some tasks in structural biology. Here we study mathematical and algorithmic properties of the flow complex and show how to exploit it in applications.