Topology Based Selection and Curation of Level Sets

The selection of appropriate level sets for the quantitative visualization of three dimensional imaging or simulation data is a problem that is both fundamental and essential. The selected level set needs to satisfy several topological and geometric constraints to be useful for subsequent quantitative processing and visualization. For an initial selection of an isosurface, guided by contour tree data structures, we detect the topological features by computing stable and unstable manifolds of the critical points of the distance function induced by the isosurface. We further enhance the description of these features by associating geometric attributes with them. We then rank the attributed features and provide a handle to them for curation of the topological anomalies.