The Flow Complex: A Data Structure for Geometric Modeling

geometry since such point sets arise naturally in many applications.
Examples in three dimesnions are point sets sampled from the surface
of a solid or the locations of the atoms in a molecule. A first step
in further processing these point sets is to structure
them in some data structure. The choice of the data structure of
course depends on the application. Structuring the point set into
a simplicial complex like the Delaunay triangulation has turned
out to be appropriate for many modeling tasks. In this talk we will
introduce the flow complex which is another simplicial complex
that can be computed efficiently from a finite point set. It turned
out to be well suited for surface reconstruction from a finite sample
and for some tasks in structural biology.