Persistence-based handle and tunnel loops computation revisited for speed up

Loops in surfaces associated with topological features such as handles and tunnels are important entities in many applications including surface parameterization, feature identification, and topological simplification. Recently, a persistent homology based algorithm has been proposed to compute them. The algorithm has several advantages including its simplicity, combinatorial nature and independence from computing other extra structures. In this paper, we propose changes to this loop computation algorithm based on some novel observations. These changes reduce the computation time of the algorithm dramatically. In particular, our experimental results show that the suggested changes achieve considerable speed up for large data sets without sacrificing loop qualities.