English

Tangles and the Mona Lisa

Combinatorics 2017-11-09 v3 Information Theory math.IT

Abstract

We show how an image can, in principle, be described by the tangles of the graph of its pixels. The tangle-tree theorem provides a nested set of separations that efficiently distinguish all the distinguishable tangles in a graph. This translates to a small data set from which the image can be reconstructed. The tangle duality theorem says that a graph either has a certain-order tangle or a tree-structure witnessing that this cannot exist. This tells us the maximum resolution at which the image contains meaningful information.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1603.06652,
  title  = {Tangles and the Mona Lisa},
  author = {Reinhard Diestel and Geoff Whittle},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1603.06652},
  year   = {2017}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T13:15:46.648Z