Maintaining Contour Trees of Dynamic Terrains

Abstract: We consider maintaining the contour tree $\mathbb{T}$ of a piecewise-linear triangulation $\mathbb{M}$ that is the graph of a time varying height function $h: \mathbb{R}^2 \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$. We carefully describe the combinatorial change in $\mathbb{T}$ that happen as $h$ varies over time and how these changes relate to topological changes in $\mathbb{M}$. We present a kinetic data structure that maintains the contour tree of $h$ over time. Our data structure maintains certificates that fail only when $h(v)=h(u)$ for two adjacent vertices $v$ and $u$ in $\mathbb{M}$, or when two saddle vertices lie on the same contour of $\mathbb{M}$. A certificate failure is handled in $O(\log(n))$ time. We also show how our data structure can be extended to handle a set of general update operations on $\mathbb{M}$ and how it can be applied to maintain topological persistence pairs of time varying functions.