. We show that the number of vertices, edges, and faces of the union of k convex polyhedra in 3-space, having a total of n faces, is O(k 3 + kn log k). This bound is almost tight in the worst case, as there exist collections of polyhedra with## k 3 + kn#(k)) union complexity. We also describe a rather simple randomized incremental algorithm for computing the boundary of the union in O(k 3 + kn log k log n) expected time. Key words. combinatorial geometry, computational geometry, combinatorial complexity, convex polyhedra, geometric algorithms, randomized algorithms AMS subject classifications. 52B10, 52B55, 65Y25, 68Q25, 68U05 PII. S0097539793250755 1. Combinatorial bounds. Let P = {P 1 , . . . , P k } be a family of k convex polyhedra in 3-space, let n i be the number of faces of P i , and let n = # k i=1 n i . Put U = # P. By the combinatorial complexity of a polyhedral set we mean the total number of its vertices, edges, and faces. Our main result is the followin...

We show that the complexity of the vertical decomposition of an arrangement of n fixeddegree algebraic surfaces or surface patches in four dimensions is O(n 4+ε), for any ε> 0. This improves the best previously known upper bound for this problem by a near-linear factor, and settles a major problem in the theory of arrangements of surfaces, open since 1989. The new bound can be extended to higher dimensions, yielding the bound O(n 2d−4+ε), for any ε> 0, on the complexity of vertical decompositions in dimensions d ≥ 4. We also describe the immediate algorithmic applications of these results, which include improved algorithms for point location, range searching, ray shooting, robot motion planning, and some geometric optimization problems. 1

We establish a near-cubic upper bound on the complexity of the space of line transversals of a collection of n balls in three dimensions, and show that the bound is almost tight, in the worst case. We apply this bound to obtain a near-cubic algorithm for computing a smallest infinite cylinder enclosing a given set of points or balls in 3-space. We also present an approximation algorithm for computing a smallest enclosing cylinder.

The Voronoi diagram of a point set is a fundamental geometric structure that partitions the space into elementary regions of influence defining a discrete proximity graph and dually a well-shaped Delaunay triangulation. In this paper, we investigate a framework for defining and building the Voronoi diagrams for a broad class of distortion measures called Bregman divergences, that includes not only the traditional (squared) Euclidean distance, but also various divergence measures based on entropic functions. As a by-product, Bregman Voronoi diagrams allow one to define information-theoretic Voronoi diagrams in statistical parametric spaces based on the relative entropy of distributions. We show that for a given Bregman divergence, one can define several types of Voronoi diagrams related to each other

In this paper we give a new algorithm for quantifier elimination in the first order theory of real closed fields that improves the complexity of the best known algorithm for this problem till now. Unlike previously known algorithms [3, 28, 22] the combinatorial part of the complexity (the part depending on the number of polynomials in the input) of this new algorithm is independent of the number of free variables. Moreover, under the assumption that each polynomial in the input depend only on a constant number of the free variables, the algebraic part of the complexity (the part depending on the degrees of the input polynomials) can also be made independent of the number of free variables. This new feature of our algorithm allows us to obtain a new algorithm for a variant of the quantifier elimination problem. We give an almost optimal algorithm for this new problem, which we call the uniform quantifier elimination problem. Using the uniform quantifier elimination algorithm, we give a...

We consider the problem of bounding the combinatorial complexity of a single cell in an arrangement of n low-degree algebraic surface patches in 3-space. We show that this complexity is O(n

Modeling the physical world in the computer raises problems that intertwine discrete and continuous aspects. For example, physical objects move along continuous trajectories; yet every so often discrete events occur, such as collisions between objects. In a model of objects in space, there are many discrete attributes that one may want to compute: the closest pair, the convex hull, the minimum spanning tree, etc. When the objects are in motion, the values of these attributes change over time, and it becomes necessary to keep track of them as the objects move. In this thesis, we introduce a general approach, and an analysis framework, for solving this type of problems. To keep track of a discrete attribute, we create a new type of data structure, called a kinetic data structure. A kinetic data structure is made of a proof of correctness of the attribute which is animated through time by a discrete event simulation. v vi Acknowledgements First and foremost, I wish to thank my senior...

INTRODUCTION Given a finite collection S of geometric objects such as hyperplanes or spheres in R d , the arrangement A(S) is the decomposition of R d into connected open cells of dimensions 0; 1; : : :; d induced by S. Besides being interesting in their own right, arrangements of hyperplanes have served as a unifying structure for many problems in discrete and computational geometry. With the recent advances in the study of arrangements of curved (algebraic) surfaces, arrangements have emerged as the underlying structure of geometric problems in a variety of `physical world' application domains such as robot motion planning and computer vision. This chapter is devoted to arrangements of hyperplanes and of curved surfaces in low-dimensional Euclidean space, with an emphasis on combinatorics and algorithms. In the first section we in

. We present a simple but powerful new probabilistic technique for analyzing the combinatorial complexity of various substructures in arrangements of piecewise-linear surfaces in higher dimensions. We apply the technique (a) to derive new and simpler proofs of the known bounds on the complexity of the lower envelope, of a single cell, or of a zone in arrangements of simplices in higher dimensions, and (b) to obtain improved bounds on the complexity of the vertical decomposition of a single cell in an arrangement of triangles in 3-space, and of several other substructures in such an arrangement (the entire arrangement, all nonconvex cells, and any collection of cells). The latter results also lead to improved algorithms for computing substructures in arrangements of triangles and for translational motion planning in three dimensions. 1. Introduction The study of arrangements of curves or surfaces is an important area of research in computational and combinatorial geometry, because many...

this paper addresses and survey previous work on these problems. We state the basic new results in Section 3. We exemplify the usefulness of these results by applying them to problems involving robot motion planning (Section 4) and visibility and aspect graphs (Section 5). Section 6 deals with new results on Minkowski sums of convex polyhedra in three dimensions, which have applications in robot motion planning and in other related areas. The paper concludes in Section 7, with further applications of the new results and with some open problems.