A polyhedral approach to compute the genus of a volume dataset

Topological characteristics are fundamental in many areas. In this paper we present a method that computes the Euler characteristic and the genus of a volume dataset. The followed approach, based on the analogy between binary volume datasets and orthogonal pseudo-polyhedra (OPP), computes the mentioned values using two models that are suitable for representing OPP: the Extreme Vertices Model (EVM) and the Ordered Union of Disjoint Boxes (OUDB). We show the results of these methods for phantom models as well as real datasets, and compare the efficiency of the presented methods with those based on the classic voxel model.