Barcodes: The persistent topology of data
Robert Ghrist · Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society · 2007
This article surveys recent work of Carlsson and collaborators on applications of computational algebraic topology to problems of feature detection and shape recognition in high-dimensional data. The primary mathematical tool considered is a homology theory for point-cloud data sets— persistent homology —and a novel representation of this algebraic characterization— barcodes . We sketch an application of these techniques to the classification of natural images.