DisPerSE: Discrete Persistent Structures Extractor

DisPerSE is open source software for the identification of persistent topological features such as peaks, voids, walls and in particular filamentary structures within noisy sampled distributions in 2D, 3D. Using DisPerSE, structure identification can be achieved through the computation of the discrete Morse-Smale complex. The software can deal directly with noisy datasets via the concept of persistence (a measure of the robustness of topological features). Although developed for the study of the properties of filamentary structures in the cosmic web of galaxy distribution over large scales in the Universe, the present version is quite versatile and should be useful for any application where a robust structure identification is required, such as for segmentation or for studying the topology of sampled functions (for example, computing persistent Betti numbers). Currently, it can be applied can work indifferently on many kinds of cell complex (such as structured and unstructured grids, 2D manifolds embedded within a 3D space, discrete point samples using delaunay tesselation, and Healpix tesselations of the sphere). The only constraint is that the distribution must be defined over a manifold, possibly with boundaries.