Digitally Continuous Multivalued Functions

We introduce in this paper a notion of continuity in digital spaces which extends the usual notion of digital continuity. Our approach uses multivalued maps. We show how the multivalued approach provides a better framework to define topological notions, like retractions, in a far more realistic way than by using just single-valued digitally continuous functions. In particular, we characterize the deletion of simple points, one of the most important processing operations in digital topology, as a particular kind of retraction.