Topologically Controlled Lossy Compression

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel lossy compression algorithm for scalar data on 2D/3D grids that guarantees preservation of topological features, enabling reliable post-hoc data analysis.

Contribution

It is the first to support strictly controlled topological feature loss in scalar data compression, with guarantees on feature preservation and size of destroyed features.

Findings

Superior topological feature preservation at similar compression rates

Guarantees on bottleneck distance between persistence diagrams

Compatibility with topological data analysis pipelines

Abstract

This paper presents a new algorithm for the lossy compression of scalar data defined on 2D or 3D regular grids, with topological control. Certain techniques allow users to control the pointwise error induced by the compression. However, in many scenarios it is desirable to control in a similar way the preservation of higher-level notions, such as topological features , in order to provide guarantees on the outcome of post-hoc data analyses. This paper presents the first compression technique for scalar data which supports a strictly controlled loss of topological features. It provides users with specific guarantees both on the preservation of the important features and on the size of the smaller features destroyed during compression. In particular, we present a simple compression strategy based on a topologically adaptive quantization of the range. Our algorithm provides strong guarantees on the bottleneck distance between persistence diagrams of the input and decompressed data, specifically those associated with extrema. A simple extension of our strategy additionally enables a control on the pointwise error. We also show how to combine our approach with state-of-the-art compressors, to further improve the geometrical reconstruction. Extensive experiments, for comparable compression rates, demonstrate the superiority of our algorithm in terms of the preservation of topological features. We show the utility of our approach by illustrating the compatibility between the output of post-hoc topological data analysis pipelines, executed on the input and decompressed data, for simulated or acquired data sets. We also provide a lightweight VTK-based C++ implementation of our approach for reproduction purposes.