Robust Morphological Measures for Large-Scale Structure

Abstract

A complete family of statistical descriptors for the morphology of large--scale structure based on Minkowski--Functionals is presented. These robust and significant measures can be used to characterize the local and global morphology of spatial patterns formed by a coverage of point sets which represent galaxy samples. Basic properties of these measures are highlighted and their relation to the `genus statistics' is discussed. Test models like a Poissonian point process and samples generated from a Voronoi--model are put into perspective.