This paper presents a survey of the Voronoi diagram, one of the most fundamental data structures in computational geometry. It demonstrates the importance and usefulness of the Voronoi diagram in a wide variety of fields inside and outside computer science and surveys the history of its development. The paper puts particular emphasis on the unified exposition of its mathematical and algorithmic properties. Finally, the paper provides the first comprehensive bibliography on Voronoi diagrams and related structures.

We use random sampling for several new geometric algorithms. The algorithms are "Las Vegas," and their expected bounds are with respect to the random behavior of the algorithms. These algorithms follow from new general results giving sharp bounds for the use of random subsets in geometric algorithms. These bounds show that random subsets can be used optimally for divide-and-conquer, and also give bounds for a simple, general technique for building geometric structures incrementally. One new algorithm reports all the intersecting pairs of a set of line segments in the plane, and requires O(A + n log n) expected time, where A is the number of intersecting pairs reported. The algorithm requires O(n) space in the worst case. Another algorithm computes the convex hull of n points in E d in O(n log n) expected time for d = 3, and O(n bd=2c ) expected time for d ? 3. The algorithm also gives fast expected times for random input points. Another algorithm computes the diameter of a set of n...

This paper describes a general-purpose programming technique, called the Simulation of Simplicity, which can be used to cope with degenerate input data for geometric algorithms. It relieves the programmer from the task to provide a consistent treatment for every single special case that can occur. The programs that use the technique tend to be considerably smaller and more robust than those that do not use it. We believe that this technique will become a standard tool in writing geometric software.

We survey the computational geometry relevant to finite element mesh generation. We especially focus on optimal triangulations of geometric domains in two- and three-dimensions. An optimal triangulation is a partition of the domain into triangles or tetrahedra, that is best according to some criterion that measures the size, shape, or number of triangles. We discuss algorithms both for the optimization of triangulations on a fixed set of vertices and for the placement of new vertices (Steiner points). We briefly survey the heuristic algorithms used in some practical mesh generators.

We present a new piv ot-based algorithm which can be used with minor modification for the enumeration of the facets of the convex hull of a set of points, or for the enumeration of the vertices of an arrangement or of a convex polyhedron, in arbitrary dimension. The algorithm has the following properties: (a) Virtually no additional storage is required beyond the input data; (b) The output list produced is free of duplicates; (c) The algorithm is extremely simple, requires no data structures, and handles all degenerate cases; (d) The running time is output sensitive for non-degenerate inputs; (e) The algorithm is easy to efficiently parallelize. For example, the algorithm finds the v vertices of a polyhedron in R d defined by a nondegenerate system of n inequalities (or dually, the v facets of the convex hull of n points in R d,where each facet contains exactly d given points) in time O(ndv) and O(nd) space. The v vertices in a simple arrangement of n hyperplanes in R d can be found in O(n 2 dv) time and O(nd) space complexity. The algorithm is based on inverting finite pivot algorithms for linear programming.

A convex polytope P can be speci ed in two ways: as the convex hull of the vertex set V of P, or as the intersection of the set H of its facet-inducing halfspaces. The vertex enumeration problem is to compute V from H. The facet enumeration problem it to compute H from V. These two problems are essentially equivalent under point/hyperplane duality. They are among the central computational problems in the theory of polytopes. It is open whether they can be solved in time polynomial in jHj + jVj. In this paper we consider the main known classes of algorithms for solving these problems. We argue that they all have at least one of two weaknesses: inability todealwell with "degeneracies," or, inability tocontrol the sizes of intermediate results. We then introduce families of polytopes that exercise those weaknesses. Roughly speaking, fat-lattice or intricate polytopes cause algorithms with bad degeneracy handling to perform badly; dwarfed polytopes cause algorithms with bad intermediate size control to perform badly. We also present computational experience with trying to solve these problem on these hard polytopes, using various implementations of the main algorithms.

We give fast randomized and deterministic parallel meth-ods for constructing convex hulls in IR d, for any fixed d. Our methods are for the weakest shared-memory model,the EREW PRAM, and have optimal work bounds (with high probability for the randomized methods). In partic-ular, we show that the convex hull of n points in IRd canbe constructed in O(log n) time using O(n log n + nbd=2c)work, with high probability. We also show that it can be constructed deterministically in O(log2 n) time using O(n log n) work for d = 3 and in O(log n) time using O(nbd=2c logc(dd=2e\Gamma bd=2c) n) work, for d * 4, where c? 0is a constant, which is optimal for even d * 4. We also showhow to make our 3-dimensional methods output-sensitive with only a small increase in running time.These methods can be applied to other problems as well. A variation of the convex hull algorithm for even dimen-sions deterministically constructs a (1=r)-cutting of n hy-perplanes in IR d in O(log n) time using optimal O(nrd\Gamma 1) work; when r = n, we obtain their arrangement and a pointlocation data structure for it. With appropriate modifications, our deterministic 3-dimensional convex hull algorithmcan be used to compute, in the same resource bounds, the intersection of n balls of equal radius in R³. This leads to asequential algorithm for computing the diameter of a point set in IR3 with running time O(n log³ n), which is arguablysimpler than an algorithm with the same running time by Brönnimann et al.

Frequently, data in scientific computing is in its abstract form a finite point set in space, and it is often useful or required to compute what one might call the "shape" of the set. For that purpose, this thesis deals with the formal notion of the family of alpha shapes of a finite point set in three- dimensional space. Each shape is a well-defined polytope, derived from the Delaunay triangulation of the point set, with a real parameter controlling the desired level of detail. Algorithms and data structures are presented that construct and store the entire family of shapes, with a quadratic time and space complexity, in the worst case.

This dissertation explores some techniques for automatic approximation of geometric objects. My thesis is that using and extending concepts from computational geometry can help us in devising efficient and parallelizable algorithms for automatically constructing useful detail hierarchies for geometric objects. We have demonstrated this by developing new algorithms for two kinds of geometric approximation problems that have been motivated by a single driving problem --- the efficient computation and display of smooth solvent-accessible molecular surfaces. The applications of these detail hierarchies are in biochemistry and computer graphics. The smooth solvent-accessible surface of a molecule is useful in studying the structure and interactions of proteins, in particular for attacking the protein-substrate docking problem. We have developed a parallel linear-time algorithm for computing molecular surfaces. Molecular surfaces are equivalent to the weighted ff-hulls. Thus our work is pot...

We show that in the worst case, Ω(n dd=2e\Gamma1 +n log n) sidedness queries are required to determine whether the convex hull of n points in R^d is simplicial, or to determine the number of convex hull facets. This lower bound matches known upper bounds in any odd dimension. Our result follows from a straightforward adversary argument. A key step in the proof is the construction of a quasi-simplicial n-vertex polytope with Ω(n dd=2e\Gamma1 ) degenerate facets. While it has been known for several years that d-dimensional convex hulls can have Ω(n bd=2c ) facets, the previously best lower bound for these problems is only Ω(n log n). Using similar techniques, we also obtain simple and correct proofs of Erickson and Seidel's lower bounds for detecting affine degeneracies in arbitrary dimensions and circular degeneracies in the plane. As a related result, we show that detecting simplicial convex hulls in R^d is ⌈d/2⌉-hard, in the in the sense of Gajentaan and Overmars.