Well-Composed Cell Complexes

Well-composed 3D digital images, which are 3D binary digital images whose boundary surface is made up by 2D manifolds, enjoy important topological and geometric properties that turn out to be advantageous for some applications. In this paper, we present a method to transform the cubical complex associated to a 3D binary digital image (which is not generally a well-composed image) into a cell complex that is homotopy equivalent to the first one and whose boundary surface is composed by 2D manifolds. This way, the new representation of the digital image can benefit from the application of algorithms that are developed over surfaces embedded in ℝ3.