Find distance from a point to a polygon - algorithm

I have a polygon that contains latitude and longitude as:
polygon= [[latitude1, longitude1], [[latitude2, longitude2]]....[latitudeN, longitudeN]]
The result of the shape is a circle, I want to calculate the distance from a point to the polygon.
I know how to find the distance from one point to another, so I can iterate over all points in the polygon and find distance against my point to find minimum distance but is there another way?
Edit-1: I have some satellites footprints over a map, those footprints are presented as a polygons. I have some other points (locations) and I want to see which satellite is closer to each point and calculate the distance to that satellite

In the case that the polygon indeed describes a circle, you could save the polygon as a center location (x,y) coordinate and the radius of the circle. The distane of a point to the polygon can be computed as the distance from the center of the circle to the wanted point, and then reduce the raidus size. As a bonus, if the resulted distance is negative, your point is inside the circle.

Related

Shifting Polygon inside Polygon

I'm having troubles figuring out an algorithm to solve the following problem:
I want the user to be able to snap the rectangle (Could be any type of polygon) to the 4 corners of the polygon such that it's as far inside the polygon as it can be.
What I'm trying so far:
Allow user to get the object.
Find the nearest vertice on the polygon to the rectangle.
Find the furthest vertice on the rectangle to the polygon's nearest vertice.
Use a plane to find the first intersection point with the furthest rectangle's point to the polygon's point.
Shift up or down using the corresponding x/y plane based on whether the furthest point is further in the x/y coordinate.
Keep repeating the steps above until everything is inside.
As long as the enclosing polygon is convex, you can write this as a linear programming problem and then apply https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplex_algorithm to find the answer. The smaller polygon you are putting inside can be as complicated as you want.
Your inequalities are all of the conditions to make sure that each vertex of the smaller polygon is inside of the larger. You don't have to be clever here, there is no cost to extra inequalities that don't come into play.
The function to optimize is constructed as follows. Look at the interior angle of the vertex you are trying to get close to. Draw a coordinate system at that point with one axis pointing directly into the polygon (call that axis y) and the other at right angles to the first (call that axis x). You want to minimize the y value of the nearest vertex on the polygon you are putting in. (Just put the polygon you are putting in in the middle, and search for the nearest vertex. Use that.
The solution that you find will be the one that puts the two vertices as close together as possible subject to the condition that the smaller polygon has to be inside of the larger.

Point of intersection between bezier curve and circle

I am aiming to create the following (a directed arrow that connects two nodes) :
At the moment I have this (a quadratic bezier curve drawn from the center point of one node to the center of another):
(Note I have drawn the bezier above the nodes to show where it begins and ends)
I need a method - heuristic or otherwise - to calculate the point of intersection (circled in red, above) between the bezier curve and the node's (ellipse) circumference.
With this, I could calculate the angle between the node center and the point of intersection to draw the arrow head lines at the correct location and angle.
As a last resort, I could use the quadratic Bézier formula to generate a list of points that lie along the curve and also generate a list of points that lie on the circumference of the circle and use one of the two coordinates that have the least euclidian distance between each other as my intersection point. I'm hoping any answers can leverage geometry or whatever else to better solve it.
The general problem is uneasy as the intersection equation is quartic ((X(t)-Xc)² + (Y(t)-Yc)²=R²), where X and Y are quadratic polynomials). If you have a quartic solver handy you can use it but you'll have to select the right root.
A more reasonable approach is just to intersect the circle with the line segment between the control points. This is approximate but probably unnoticeable if the circle radius is small.
If you want more accuracy, perform one or two Newton's iterations from this point.

Colouring the plane based on nearest point

I have N (x, y) points on plane, i-th point having colour i
I need to colour the plane based on nearest point's colour.
I suppose final colours could be represented as polygons with vertices in points of equal distance from multiple initial points.
Have no idea how to approach it. My thoughts so far: points in the middle of two points (where there are no other points with smaller distance) will be on the resulting polygons, but then we need to find equidistant points inside empty space to built the rest of resulting polygons.

Project 3D polygon into a 2D plane such that the vertices are in counter clockwise order

Some fast algorithms for working with polygons require the vertices of the polygon to have a specific order (clockwise or counter clockwise with respect to the polygon's plane normal).
To use those algorithms in 3D planar polygons (where all the points lie in a particular plane) one can perform a change of basis to a basis spanned by two orthogonal vectors that lie in the plane and a plane normal vector.
Is there a way to always find a basis in which the polygon vertices are always in counter clockwise (or clockwise) order?
Perhaps the best method is to compute the signed area of the polygon, and if it is negative, you know your vertices are clockwise; so reverse. If it is positive, your vertices are counterclockwise.
Search for "signed area of polygon." Here is one Mathematica link:

Separate circle and rectangle

In a 2d space there are a rectangle and a circle that overlap each other. How can
I calculate the smallest distance (depth) that I need to separate the circle and the rectangle?
I'll assume from the way you've described it if one shape entirely contains the other, that still counts as "overlapping"
The strategy to separate a circle from a rectangle while moving the circle the shortest distance is as follows:
Draw a line from the circle's centre to the nearest point on one of the rectangle's vertices
Pull the circle along this line until they are no longer overlapping
So to calculate the distance that it needs to be pulled, your formula will be:
pullDistance = radius - centreDistance
Where:
pullDistance is what you're trying to calculate
radius is the radius of the circle
centreDistance is the distance of the centre of the circle from the nearest point on the edge of the rectangle.
Two things to note:
If the centre of the circle is inside the rectangle, then centreDistance should be calculated the same way, but made negative
If the pullDistance is negative then the two shapes are already not overlapping, so the true distance is 0.
So since radius is known, all you have to do is calculate the centreDistance. The way to do this is to find the distance from the circle's centre point to each of the rectangle's four line segments and take the minimum. Finding the distance between a point and a line segment is a common task, I won't repeat how to do that here. This question has a lot of samples and information for how to do it.

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