IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (Proc. IEEE VIS 2024), 2025.
Author: Yuxiao Li, Xin Liang, Bei Wang, Yongfeng Qiu, Lin Yan, Hanqi Guo
DOI | arXiv | GitHub
Abstract
This research explores a novel paradigm for preserving topological segmentations in existing error-bounded lossy compressors. Today’s lossy compressors rarely consider preserving topologies such as Morse-Smale complexes, and the discrepancies in topology between original and decompressed datasets could potentially result in erroneous interpretations or even incorrect scientific conclusions. In this paper, we focus on preserving Morse-Smale segmentations in 2D/3D piecewise linear scalar fields, targeting the precise reconstruction of minimum/maximum labels induced by the integral line of each vertex. The key is to derive a series of edits during compression time; the edits are applied to the decompressed data, leading to an accurate reconstruction of segmentations while keeping the error within the prescribed error bound. To this end, we developed a workflow to fix extrema and integral lines alternatively until convergence within finite iterations; we accelerate each workflow component with shared-memory/GPU parallelism to make the performance practical for coupling with compressors. We demonstrate use cases with fluid dynamics, ocean, and cosmology application datasets with a significant acceleration with an NVIDIA A100 GPU.