The nudged elastic band method for effective natural image patches analysis

Abstract

We used sampled data from a well-established database of natural images to construct a density estimator, which is designed to act as a Morse function. We constructed one-dimensional cell complexes through this Morse function by utilizing the nudged elastic band method. By making use of cell complexes, we detect some topological characterizations of natural image data, and we experimentally show that spaces of high-contrast n × n patches (n = 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) with different subsets have the same topology as a circle.