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We propose an efficient threshold dynamics method for topology optimization for fluids modeled with the Stokes equation. The proposed algorithm is based on minimization of an objective energy function that consists of the dissipation power in the fluid and the perimeter approximated by nonlocal energy, subject to a fluid volume constraint and the incompressibility condition. We show that the minimization problem can be solved with an iterative scheme in which the Stokes equation is approximated by a Brinkman equation. The indicator functions of the fluid-solid regions are then updated according to simple convolutions followed by a thresholding step. We demonstrate mathematically that the iterative algorithm has the total energy decaying property. The proposed algorithm is simple and easy to implement. A simple adaptive time strategy is also used to accelerate the convergence of the iteration. Extensive numerical experiments in both two and three dimensions show that the proposed iteration algorithm is quite robust and converges in much fewer iterations and is more efficient than many existing methods.

In this paper, we propose a novel iterative convolution-thresholding method (ICTM) that is applicable to a range of variational models for image segmentation. A variational model usually minimizes an energy functional consisting of a fidelity term and a regularization term. In the ICTM, the interface between two different segment domains is implicitly represented by their characteristic functions. The fidelity term is usually written as a linear functional of the characteristic functions and the regularized term is approximated by a functional of characteristic functions in terms of heat kernel convolution. This allows us to design an iterative convolution-thresholding method to minimize the approximate energy. The method is simple, efficient and enjoys the energy-decaying property. Numerical experiments show that the method is easy to implement, robust and applicable to various image segmentation models.