UTILITY OF DIGITAL COVERING THEORY

Various properties of digital covering spaces have been substantially used in studying digital homotopic properties of digital images. In particular, these are so related to the study of a digital fundamental group, a classification of digital images, an automorphism group of a digital covering space and so forth. The goal of the present paper, as a survey article, to speak out utility of digital covering theory. Besides, the present paper recalls that the papers [1, 4, 30] took their own approaches into the study of a digital fundamental group. For instance, they consider the digital fundamental group of the special digital image (X, 4), where X := $SC^{2,8}_4$ which is a simple closed 4-curve with eight elements in $Z^2$, as a group which is isomorphic to an infinite cyclic group such as (Z, +). In spite of this approach, they could not propose any digital topological tools to get the result. Namely, the papers [4, 30] consider a simple closed 4 or 8-curve to be a kind of simple closed curve from the viewpoint of a Hausdorff topological structure, i.e. a continuous analogue induced by an algebraic topological approach. However, in digital topology we need to develop a digital topological tool to calculate a digital fundamental group of a given digital space. Finally, the paper [9] firstly developed the notion of a digital covering space and further, the advanced and simplified version was proposed in [21]. Thus the present paper refers the history and the process of calculating a digital fundamental group by using various tools and some utilities of digital covering spaces. Furthermore, we deal with some parts of the preprint [11] which were not published in a journal (see Theorems 4.3 and 4.4). Finally, the paper suggests an efficient process of the calculation of digital fundamental groups of digital images.