Procedural content generation often employs grid-based methods to create virtual environments. We present a pipeline that utilizes Voronoi diagrams and Lloyd’s Relaxation to construct an irregular mesh for terrain generation. We implement a customizable "Land Anchor" system combined with Perlin noise to determine landmass shapes, distinct from standard radial distribution methods. Furthermore, we simulate hydrology using priority-flood routing on the Voronoi edges and assign biomes via a Gaussian-smoothed Whittaker classification. The full pipeline is exposed through an interactive application that enables real-time parameter tuning and terrain export, and resulting geometric data is extruded in Blender to produce a 3D terrain model.

Image triangulation, the practice of decomposing images into triangles, deliberately employs simplification to create an abstracted representation. While triangulating an image is a relatively simple process, difficulties arise when determining which vertices produce recognizable and visually pleasing output images. With the goal of producing art, we discuss an image triangulation algorithm in Python that utilizes Sobel edge detection and point cloud sparsification to determine final vertices for a triangulation, resulting in the creation of artistic triangulated compositions.

We study Vietoris-Rips and Cech complexes of metric wedge sums and metric gluings. We show that the Vietoris-Rips (resp. Cech) complex of a wedge sum, equipped with a natural metric, is homotopy equivalent to the wedge sum of the Vietoris-Rips (resp. Cech) complexes. We also provide generalizations for certain metric gluings, i.e. when two metric spaces are glued together along a common isometric subset. As our main example, we deduce the homotopy type of the Vietoris-Rips complex of two metric graphs glued together along a sufficiently short path. As a result, we can describe the persistent homology, in all homological dimensions, of the Vietoris-Rips complexes of a wide class of metric graphs.

Many data sets can be viewed as a noisy sampling of an underlying space, and tools from topological data analysis can characterize this structure for the purpose of knowledge discovery. One such tool is persistent homology, which provides a multiscale description of the homological features within a data set. A useful representation of this homological information is a persistence diagram (PD). Efforts have been made to map PDs into spaces with additional structure valuable to machine learning tasks. We convert a PD to a finite- dimensional vector representation which we call a persistence image (PI), and prove the stability of this transformation with respect to small perturbations in the inputs. The discriminatory power of PIs is compared against existing methods, showing significant performance gains. We explore the use of PIs with vector-based machine learning tools, such as linear sparse support vector machines, which identify features containing discriminating topological information. Finally, high accuracy inference of parameter values from the dynamic output of a discrete dynamical system (the linked twist map) and a partial differential equation (the anisotropic Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation) provide a novel application of the discriminatory power of PIs.

We present an application of persistent homology to the detection of chemical plumes in hyperspectral movies. The pixels of the raw hyperspectral data cubes are mapped to the geometric framework of the real Grassmann manifold G(k, n) (whose points parameterize the k-dimensional subspaces of ℝn) where they are analyzed, contrasting our approach with the more standard framework in Euclidean space. An advantage of this approach is that it allows the time slices in a hyperspectral movie to be collapsed to a sequence of points in such a way that some of the key structure within and between the slices is encoded by the points on the Grassmann manifold. This motivates the search for topological structure, associated with the evolution of the frames of a hyperspectral movie, within the corresponding points on the Grassmann manifold. The proposed framework affords the processing of large data sets, such as the hyperspectral movies explored in this investigation, while retaining valuable discriminative information.