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Closest Points
Proximity problems is a class of problems in computational geometry which involve estimation of distances between geometric objects. A subset of these problems stated in terms of points only are sometimes referred to as closest point problems, although the term "closest point problem" is also used synonymously to the nearest neighbor search. A common trait for many of these problems is the possibility to establish the Θ(''n'' log ''n'') lower bound on their computational complexity by reduction from the element uniqueness problem basing on an observation that if there is an efficient algorithm to compute some kind of minimal distance for a set of objects, it is trivial to check whether this distance equals to 0. Atomic problems While these problems pose no computational complexity challenge, some of them are notable because of their ubiquity in computer applications of geometry. *Distance between a pair of line segments. It cannot be expressed by a single formula, unlike, e ...
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Computational Geometry
Computational geometry is a branch of computer science devoted to the study of algorithms which can be stated in terms of geometry. Some purely geometrical problems arise out of the study of computational geometric algorithms, and such problems are also considered to be part of computational geometry. While modern computational geometry is a recent development, it is one of the oldest fields of computing with a history stretching back to antiquity. Analysis of algorithms, Computational complexity is central to computational geometry, with great practical significance if algorithms are used on very large datasets containing tens or hundreds of millions of points. For such sets, the difference between O(''n''2) and O(''n'' log ''n'') may be the difference between days and seconds of computation. The main impetus for the development of computational geometry as a discipline was progress in computer graphics and computer-aided design and manufacturing (Computer-aided design, CAD/Compu ...
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Nearest Neighbor Query
Nearest neighbor search (NNS), as a form of proximity search, is the optimization problem of finding the point in a given set that is closest (or most similar) to a given point. Closeness is typically expressed in terms of a dissimilarity function: the less similar the objects, the larger the function values. Formally, the nearest-neighbor (NN) search problem is defined as follows: given a set ''S'' of points in a space ''M'' and a query point ''q'' ∈ ''M'', find the closest point in ''S'' to ''q''. Donald Knuth in vol. 3 of ''The Art of Computer Programming'' (1973) called it the post-office problem, referring to an application of assigning to a residence the nearest post office. A direct generalization of this problem is a ''k''-NN search, where we need to find the ''k'' closest points. Most commonly ''M'' is a metric space and dissimilarity is expressed as a distance metric, which is symmetric and satisfies the triangle inequality. Even more common, ''M'' is taken ...
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Largest Empty Rectangle
In computational geometry, the largest empty rectangle problem, maximal empty rectangle problem or maximum empty rectangle problem, is the problem of finding a rectangle of maximal size to be placed among obstacles in the plane. There are a number of variants of the problem, depending on the particularities of this generic formulation, in particular, depending on the measure of the "size", domain (type of obstacles), and the orientation of the rectangle. The problems of this kind arise e.g., in electronic design automation, in design and verification of physical layout of integrated circuits. A maximal empty rectangle is a rectangle which is not contained in another empty rectangle. Each side of a maximal empty rectangle abuts an obstacle (otherwise the side may be shifted outwards, increasing the empty rectangle). An application of this kind is enumeration of "maximal white rectangles" in image segmentation R&D of image processing and pattern recognition. In the contexts o ...
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Bounding Box
In geometry, the minimum or smallest bounding or enclosing box for a point set in dimensions is the box with the smallest measure (area, volume, or hypervolume in higher dimensions) within which all the points lie. When other kinds of measure are used, the minimum box is usually called accordingly, e.g., "minimum-perimeter bounding box". The minimum bounding box of a point set is the same as the minimum bounding box of its convex hull, a fact which may be used heuristically to speed up computation. The terms "box" and "hyperrectangle" come from their usage in the Cartesian coordinate system, where they are indeed visualized as a rectangle (two-dimensional case), rectangular parallelepiped (three-dimensional case), etc. In the two-dimensional case it is called the minimum bounding rectangle. Axis-aligned minimum bounding box The axis-aligned minimum bounding box (or AABB) for a given point set is its minimum bounding box subject to the constraint that the edges of the box are ...
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Smallest Enclosing Rectangle
In computational geometry, the smallest enclosing box problem is that of finding the oriented minimum bounding box enclosing a set of points. It is a type of bounding volume. "Smallest" may refer to volume, area, perimeter, ''etc.'' of the box. It is sufficient to find the smallest enclosing box for the convex hull of the objects in question. It is straightforward to find the smallest enclosing box that has sides parallel to the coordinate axes; the difficult part of the problem is to determine the orientation of the box. Two dimensions For the convex polygon, a linear time algorithm for the minimum-area enclosing rectangle is known. It is based on the observation that a side of a minimum-area enclosing box must be collinear with a side of the convex polygon. It is possible to enumerate boxes of this kind in linear time with the approach called rotating calipers by Godfried Toussaint in 1983.. The same approach is applicable for finding the minimum-perimeter enclosing rectan ...
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Convex Hull
In geometry, the convex hull or convex envelope or convex closure of a shape is the smallest convex set that contains it. The convex hull may be defined either as the intersection of all convex sets containing a given subset of a Euclidean space, or equivalently as the set of all convex combinations of points in the subset. For a bounded subset of the plane, the convex hull may be visualized as the shape enclosed by a rubber band stretched around the subset. Convex hulls of open sets are open, and convex hulls of compact sets are compact. Every compact convex set is the convex hull of its extreme points. The convex hull operator is an example of a closure operator, and every antimatroid can be represented by applying this closure operator to finite sets of points. The algorithmic problems of finding the convex hull of a finite set of points in the plane or other low-dimensional Euclidean spaces, and its dual problem of intersecting half-spaces, are fundamental problems of com ...
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Largest Empty Circle
In computational geometry, the largest empty sphere problem is the problem of finding a hypersphere of largest radius in ''d''-dimensional space whose interior does not overlap with any given obstacles. Two dimensions The largest empty circle problem is the problem of finding a circle of largest radius in the plane whose interior does not overlap with any given obstacles. A common special case is as follows. Given ''n'' points in the plane, find a largest circle centered within their convex hull and enclosing none of them. The problem may be solved using Voronoi diagrams in optimal time \Theta(n\, \log\, n).Megan Schuster"The Largest Empty Circle Problem"/ref> See also *Bounding sphere *Farthest-first traversal *Largest empty rectangle In computational geometry, the largest empty rectangle problem, maximal empty rectangle problem or maximum empty rectangle problem, is the problem of finding a rectangle of maximal size to be placed among obstacles in the plane. There a ...
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Smallest Enclosing Sphere
In mathematics, given a non-empty set of objects of finite extension in d-dimensional space, for example a set of points, a bounding sphere, enclosing sphere or enclosing ball for that set is an d-dimensional solid sphere containing all of these objects. Used in computer graphics and computational geometry, a bounding sphere is a special type of bounding volume. There are several fast and simple bounding sphere construction algorithms with a high practical value in real-time computer graphics applications. In statistics and operations research, the objects are typically points, and generally the sphere of interest is the minimal bounding sphere, that is, the sphere with minimal radius among all bounding spheres. It may be proven that such a sphere is unique: If there are two of them, then the objects in question lie within their intersection. But an intersection of two non-coinciding spheres of equal radius is contained in a sphere of smaller radius. The problem of computing ...
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Voronoi Diagram
In mathematics, a Voronoi diagram is a partition of a plane into regions close to each of a given set of objects. In the simplest case, these objects are just finitely many points in the plane (called seeds, sites, or generators). For each seed there is a corresponding region, called a Voronoi cell, consisting of all points of the plane closer to that seed than to any other. The Voronoi diagram of a set of points is dual to that set's Delaunay triangulation. The Voronoi diagram is named after mathematician Georgy Voronoy, and is also called a Voronoi tessellation, a Voronoi decomposition, a Voronoi partition, or a Dirichlet tessellation (after Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet). Voronoi cells are also known as Thiessen polygons. Voronoi diagrams have practical and theoretical applications in many fields, mainly in science and technology, but also in visual art. The simplest case In the simplest case, shown in the first picture, we are given a finite set of points in the Euclidean p ...
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Delaunay Triangulation
In mathematics and computational geometry, a Delaunay triangulation (also known as a Delone triangulation) for a given set P of discrete points in a general position is a triangulation DT(P) such that no point in P is inside the circumcircle of any triangle in DT(P). Delaunay triangulations maximize the minimum of all the angles of the triangles in the triangulation; they tend to avoid sliver triangles. The triangulation is named after Boris Delaunay for his work on this topic from 1934. For a set of points on the same line there is no Delaunay triangulation (the notion of triangulation is degenerate for this case). For four or more points on the same circle (e.g., the vertices of a rectangle) the Delaunay triangulation is not unique: each of the two possible triangulations that split the quadrangle into two triangles satisfies the "Delaunay condition", i.e., the requirement that the circumcircles of all triangles have empty interiors. By considering circumscribed spheres, ...
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Euclidean Minimum Spanning Tree
A Euclidean minimum spanning tree of a finite set of points in the Euclidean plane or higher-dimensional Euclidean space connects the points by a system of line segments with the points as endpoints, minimizing the total length of the segments. In it, any two points can reach each other along a path through the line segments. It can be found as the minimum spanning tree of a complete graph with the points as vertices and the Euclidean distances between points as edge weights. The edges of the minimum spanning tree meet at angles of at least 60°, at most six to a vertex. In higher dimensions, the number of edges per vertex is bounded by the kissing number of tangent unit spheres. The total length of the edges, for points in a unit square, is at most proportional to the square root of the number of points. Each edge lies in an empty region of the plane, and these regions can be used to prove that the Euclidean minimum spanning tree is a subgraph of other geometric graphs includin ...
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Minimum Spanning Tree
A minimum spanning tree (MST) or minimum weight spanning tree is a subset of the edges of a connected, edge-weighted undirected graph that connects all the vertices together, without any cycles and with the minimum possible total edge weight. That is, it is a spanning tree whose sum of edge weights is as small as possible. More generally, any edge-weighted undirected graph (not necessarily connected) has a minimum spanning forest, which is a union of the minimum spanning trees for its connected components. There are many use cases for minimum spanning trees. One example is a telecommunications company trying to lay cable in a new neighborhood. If it is constrained to bury the cable only along certain paths (e.g. roads), then there would be a graph containing the points (e.g. houses) connected by those paths. Some of the paths might be more expensive, because they are longer, or require the cable to be buried deeper; these paths would be represented by edges with larger weights ...
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