The Localized Union-of-Balls Bifiltration

Abstract: We propose an extension of the classical union-of-balls filtration of persistent homology: fixing a point $q$, we focus our attention to a ball centered at $q$ whose radius is controlled by a second scale parameter. We discuss an absolute variant, where the union is just restricted to the $q$-ball, and a relative variant where the homology of the $q$-ball relative to its boundary is considered. Interestingly, these natural constructions lead to bifiltered simplicial complexes which are not $k$-critical for any finite $k$. Nevertheless, we demonstrate that these bifiltrations can be computed exactly and efficiently, and we provide a prototypical implementation using the CGAL library. We also argue that some of the recent algorithmic advances for $2$-parameter persistence (which usually assume $k$-criticality for some finite $k$) carry over to the $\infty$-critical case.