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Abstract

In this paper we introduce a new compression technique for 2D vector fields
which preserves the complete topology, i.e., the critical points and the
connectivity of the separatrices. As the theoretical foundation of the
algorithm, we show in a theorem that for local modifications of a vector field,
it is possible to decide entirely by a local analysis whether or not the global
topology is preserved. This result is applied in a compression algorithm which
is based on a repeated local modification of the vector field - namely a
repeated edge collapse of the underlying piecewise linear domain. We apply the
compression technique to a number of data sets with a complex topology and
obtain significantly improved compression ratios in comparison to pre-existing
topology-preserving techniques.