  A review of results from lattice studies using improved and scale controlled
cooling methods is presented and their significance is discussed. The
improvement of the action ensures stable instanton solutions of physical sizes.
The scale controlled cooling can be generally used as a gauge invariant low
pass filter to extract the physics from noisy MC configurations; in particular
it preserves instanton-antiinstanton pairs selected according to their
interaction. We apply these methods to analyze various features of the
topological structure of the Yang-Mills vacuum in a scaling invariant way.
