An introduction to computational aspects of polynomial amoebas -- a survey

We review results of papers written on the topic of polynomial amoebas with an emphasis on computational aspects of the topic. The polynomial amoebas have a lot of applications in various domains of science. Computation of the amoeba for a given polynomial and describing its properties is in general a problem of formidable complexity. We describe the main algorithms for computing and depicting the amoebas and geometrical objects associated with them, such as contours and spin...

We present algorithms for computation and visualization of amoebas, their contours, compactified amoebas and sections of three-dimensional amoebas by two-dimensional planes. We also provide method and an algorithm for the computation of~polynomials whose amoebas exhibit the most complicated topology among all polynomials with a fixed Newton polytope. The presented algorithms are implemented in computer algebra systems Matlab 8 and Mathematica 9.

The amoebas associated to algebraic varieties are certain concave regions in the Euclidean space whose shape reminds biological amoebas. This term was formally introduced to Mathematics in 1994 by Gelfand, Kapranov and Zelevinski. Some traces of amoebas were appearing from time to time, even before the formal introduction, as auxiliary tools in several problems. After 1994 amoebas have been seen and studied in several areas of mathematics, from algebraic geometry and topology...

The computation of amoebas has been a challenging open problem for the last dozen years. The most natural approach, namely to compute an amoeba via its boundary, has not been practical so far since only a superset of the boundary, the contour, is understood in theory and computable in practice. We define and characterize the extended boundary of an amoeba, which is sensitive to some degenerations that the topological boundary does not detect. Our description of the extended...

This survey consists of two parts. Part 1 is devoted to amoebas. These are images of algebraic subvarieties in the complex torus under the logarithmic moment map. The amoebas have essentially piecewise-linear shape if viewed at large. Furthermore, they degenerate to certain piecewise-linear objects called tropical varieties whose behavior is governed by algebraic geometry over the so-called tropical semifield. Geometric aspects of tropical algebraic geometry are the content o...

The paper deals with amoebas of $k$-dimensional algebraic varieties in the algebraic complex torus of dimension $n\geq 2k$. First, we show that the area of complex algebraic curve amoebas is finite. Moreover, we give an estimate of this area in the rational curve case in terms of the degree of the rational parametrization coordinates. We also show that the volume of the amoeba of $k$-dimensional algebraic variety in $(\mathbb{C}^*)^{n}$, with $n\geq 2k$, is finite.

Detecting the edges of objects within images is critical for quality image processing. We present an edge-detecting technique that uses morphological amoebas that adjust their shape based on variation in image contours. We evaluate the method both quantitatively and qualitatively for edge detection of images, and compare it to classic morphological methods. Our amoeba-based edge-detection system performed better than the classic edge detectors.

In this note, we investigate the maximal number of intersection points of a line with the contour of hypersurface amoebas in $\mathbb{R}^n$. We define the latter number to be the $\mathbb{R}$-degree of the contour. We also investigate the $\mathbb{R}$-degree of related sets such as the boundary of amoebas and the amoeba of the real part of hypersurfaces defined over $\mathbb{R}$. For all these objects, we provide bounds for the respective $\mathbb{R}$-degrees.

Recently Krichever proposed a generalization of the amoeba and the Ronkin function of a plane algebraic curve. In our paper higher-dimensional version of this generalization is studied. We translate to the generalized case different geometric results known in the standard amoebas case.

The amoeba of a Laurent polynomial is the image of the corresponding hypersurface under the coordinatewise log absolute value map. In this article, we demonstrate that a theoretical amoeba approximation method due to Purbhoo can be used efficiently in practice. To do this, we resolve the main bottleneck in Purbhoo's method by exploiting relations between cyclic resultants. We use the same approach to give an approximation of the Log preimage of the amoeba of a Laurent polynom...