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.

This paper studies the point location problem in Delaunay triangulations without preprocessing and additional storage. The proposed procedure finds the query point simply by "walking through" the triangulation, after selecting a "good starting point" by random sampling. The analysis generalizes and extends a recent result for d = 2 dimensions by proving this procedure to take expected time close to O(n 1=(d+1) ) for point location in Delaunay triangulations of n random points in d = 3 dimensions. Empirical results in both two and three dimensions show that this procedure is efficient in practice.

The excluded middle vantage point forest is a new data structure that supports worst case sublinear time searches in a metric space for nearest neighbors within a xed radius of arbitrary queries. Worst case performance depends on the dataset but is not aected by the distribution of queries. Our analysis predicts vp-forest performance in simple settings such as L p spaces with uniform random datasets | and experiments conrm these predictions. Another contribution of the analysis is a new perspective on the curse of dimensionality in the context of our methods and kd-trees as well. In our idealized setting the dataset is organized into a forest of O(N 1 ) trees, each of depth O(log N ). Here may be viewed as depending on , the distance function, and on the dataset. The radius of interest is an input to the organization process and the result is a linear space data structure specialized to answer queries within this distance. Searches then require O(N 1 log N) time, or...

We consider the problem of nearest neighbor search in the Euclidean hypercube [ 1, +1]^d with uniform distributions, and the additional natural assumption that the nearest neighbor is located within a constant fraction R of the maximum interpoint distance in this space, i.e. within distance 2R√d of the query. We introduce the idea of aggressive pruning and give a family of practical algorithms, an idealized analysis, and describe experiments. Our main result is that search complexity measured in terms of d-dimensional inner product operations, is i) strongly sublinear with respect to the data set size n for moderate R, ii) asymptotically, and as a practical matter, independent of dimension. Given a random data set, a random query within distance 2R√d of some database element, and a randomly constructed data structure, the search succeeds with a specified probability, which is a parameter of the search algorithm. On average a search performs...

In this paper a dynamic technique for locating a point in a monotone planar subdivision, whose current number of vertices is n, is presented. The (complete set of) update operations are insertion of a point on an edge and of a chain of edges between two vertices, and their reverse operations. The data structure uses space O(n). The query time is O(log n), the time for insertion/deletion of a point is O(log n), and the time for insertion/deletion of a chain with k edges is O(log n + k), all worst-case. The technique is conceptually a special case of the chain method of Lee and Preparata and uses the same query algorithm. The emergence of full dynamic capabilities is afforded by a subtle choice of the chain set (separators), which induces a total order on the set of regions of the planar subdivision.

We present parallel algorithms for some fundamental problems in computational geometry which have running time of O(logn) using n processors, with very high probability (approaching 1 as n ! 1). These include planar point location, triangulation and trapezoidal decomposition. We also present optimal algorithms for 3-D maxima and two-set dominance counting by an application of integer sorting. Most of these algorithms run on CREW PRAM model and have optimal processor-time product which improve on the previously best known algorithms of Atallah and Goodrich [3] for these problems. The crux of these algorithms is a useful data structure which emulates the plane sweeping paradigm used for sequential algorithms. We extend some of the techniques used by Reischuk [22] Reif and Valiant [21] for ashsort algorithm to perform divide and conquer in a plane very eciently leading to the improved performance by our approach. 0 This is a substantially revised version of the paper that ap...

In this paper, we present a new approach to recognizing hand signs. In this approach, motion recognition (the hand movement) is tightly coupled with spatial recognition (hand shape). The system uses multiclass, multidimensional discriminant analysis to automatically select the most discriminating linear features for gesture classification. A recursive partition tree approximator is proposed to do classification. This approach combined with our previous work on hand segmentation forms a new framework which addresses the three key aspects of hand sign interpretation: the hand shape, the location, and the movement. The framework has been tested to recognize 28 different hand signs. The experimental results show that the system achieved a 93.2% recognition rate for test sequences that have not been used in the training phase. It is shown that our approach provides better performance than the nearest neighbor classification in the eigen-subspace. 1 1 Introduction The ability to i...

Given a collection S of n line segments in the plane, the planar point location problem is to construct a data structure that can efficiently determine for a given query point p the first segment(s) in S intersected by vertical rays emanating out from p. It is well known that linear-space data structures can be constructed so as to achieve O(log n) query times. But applications, such as those common in geographic information systems, motivate a re-examination of this problem with the goal of improving query times further while also simplifying the methods needed to achieve such query times. In this paper we perform such a re-examination, focusing on the issues that arise in three different classes of pointlocation query sequences: ffl sequences that are reasonably uniform spatially and temporally (in which case the constant factors in the query times become critical), ffl sequences that are non-uniform spatially or temporally (in which case one desires data structures that adapt to s...

In this paper we study the problem of finding the approximate nearest neighbor of a query point in the high dimensional space, focusing on the Euclidean space. The earlier approaches use locality-preserving hash functions (that tend to map nearby points to the same value) to construct several hash tables to ensure that the query point hashes to the same bucket as its nearest neighbor in at least one table. Our approach is different – we use one (or a few) hash table and hash several randomly chosen points in the neighborhood of the query point showing that at least one of them will hash to the bucket containing its nearest neighbor. We show that the number of randomly chosen points in the neighborhood of the query point q required depends on the entropy of the hash value h(p) of a random point p at the same distance from q at its nearest neighbor, given q and the locality preserving hash function h chosen randomly from the hash family. Precisely, we show that if the entropy I(h(p)|q, h) = M and g is a bound on the probability that two far-off points will hash to the same bucket, then we can find the approximate nearest neighbor in O(nρ) time and near linear Õ(n) space where ρ = M/log(1/g). Alternatively we can build a data structure of size Õ(n1/(1−ρ) ) to answer queries in Õ(d) time. By applying this analysis to the locality preserving hash functions in [17, 21, 6] and adjusting the parameters we show that the c nearest neighbor can be computed in time Õ(nρ) and near linear space where ρ ≈ 2.06/c as c becomes large.

As most important applications today are large-scale in nature, high-performance methods are becoming indispensable. Two promising computational paradigms for large-scale applications are dynamic and I/O-efficient computations. We give efficient dynamic data structures for several fundamental problems in computational geometry, including point location, ray shooting, shortest path, and minimum-link path. We also develop a collection of new techniques for designing and analyzing I/O-efficient algorithms for graph problems, and illustrate how these techniques can be applied to a wide variety of specific problems, including list ranking, Euler tour, expression-tree evaluation, least-common ancestors, connected and biconnected components, minimum spanning forest, ear decomposition, topological sorting, reachability, graph drawing, and visibility representation. Finally, we present an extensive experimental study comparing the practical I/O efficiency of four algorithms for the orthogonal s...