CHomP

CHomP is a homology software developed at Computational Homology Project, Rutgers University and Computer Assisted Proofs in Dynamics group, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland

CHomP runs on Windows and consists of 38 individual programs for homology computations in n-dimensions. CHomP can compute the Betti numbers and homology of a simplicial and cubical complexes as well as the maps induced in homology.

The main algorithms are explained in detail in Computational Homology by Kaczynski, Mischaikow, Mrozek. It is a very powerful, yet very easy package to use, with no installation necessary. This last part unfortunately doesn't apply to the recent releases...

Issues:

• Some of CHomP's power is wasted if you only are interested in 2D images;
• CHomP does not do gray scale images;
• CHomP does not measure the topological features, so if you need to evaluate their importance (to deal with noise etc), you have to extract them from the image;
• An alternative to measuring is persistence but it's also absent currently.

Also:

• Documentation is poor to say the least.
• Before you can run CHomP, you'll need to pull together a few libraries/packages/tools from different sources (also poorly documented), install, and configure them.
• You will definitely need a programmer to do that.

A recent project provided code for CHomP for computing persistence: 3D image analysis.

See also CHomP examples and other homology software.