There are quite many algoritms for finding Voronoi diagram with Euclidean distance. However, I haven't found any algorithms other distance functions, for example, Manhattan distance (perhaps, because of no practical applications).
You can see example at Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voronoi_diagram#/media/File:Manhattan_Voronoi_Diagram.svg
Manhattan Voronoi diagram also consists of polygons (but non-convex), so I guess that algorithm similar to Fortune's algorithm can be constructed.
However, using more complex distance functions, boundaries won't be polygons anymore. There will be need in different data structure and algorithm.
Are there any algorithms for finding Voronoi diagram with specific distance function (in 2D for simplicity)?
Note:
I don't need an algorithm which works with pixels, it's pretty straightforward, I need algorithm, which founds the boundaries of cells.
Note 2
Practically I need Voronoi diagram with distance function abs(dx)^3 + abs(dy)^3, however, theoretically, I'm interested how one do make an algorithm for other distance functions.
Here is how Voronoi with abs(dx)^3 + abs(dy)^3 look like. Sites are continous and their edges resemble graphs of y=x^3 (just assumption).
Most likely you can use the pixel taxi voronoi and give each polygon a different color. You can then use a pixel color test to check the bounds.
Related
A Voronoi diagram is a kind of tesselation that divided the medium into polygons in 2D and polyhedrons in 3D.
Although there are many algorithms to construct a Voronoi diagram, some of them are faster than others. Based on my knowledge, Fortune's algorithm is fastest to construct the Voronoi diagram either in two dimensional or three dimensional.
Fortune's algorithm is based on the sweep-line strategy and balanced binary search tree.
Now, I want to implement Fortune's algorithm into three dimensional. I want to know which basically variation is made to fit the algorithm to three dimensional?
There is a problem in my book that uses the concept of closest-point and farthest-point Voronoi diagrams to construct a minimum width annulus for a set of points (used in coordinate measurement machines).
What I need to know:
Say you construct the closest-point voronoi diagram (CPVD) and the farthest-point voronoi diagram (FPVD) on a set of points P. What is an efficient way to find the intersections between the CPVD's edges and the FPVD's edges (if you overlay the two diagrams) if you know there are only O(n) intersections.
I just can't think of a way that is faster than O(n^2). Is there some property I'm glossing over?
I have some polygons (obstacles) within a rectangle (the borders are obstacles) and I want to find the Voronoi diagram, that means the diagram that shows the lines that have equal distance to two obstacles.
For example (created with this, please ignore the smiley and the flag):
The voronoi diagram seems to be not a set of polygons (which would be easy to represent). This one seems to have curves. It was generated by calculating for each pixel the distance to each obstacle.
I have seen this, but it has no polygons, but only points.
How can I represent such a voronoi diagram?
(By the way, I would also be happy if you had some good articles about this voronoi path planning problem ... I can only find many for points as obstacles.)
You may use the Voronoi Diagram implementation from Boost.Polygon. Maybe if you want your own implementation you can learn looking at the Boost source code.
The Boost.Polygon library provides implementation of the Voronoi
diagram data structure in 2D space. The internal representation
consists of the three arrays, that respectively contain: Voronoi cells
(represent the area around the input sites bounded by the Voronoi
edges), Voronoi vertices (points where three or more Voronoi edges
intersect), Voronoi edges (the one dimensional curves containing
points equidistant from the two closest input sites). Each of the
primitives (cell, vertex, edge) contains pointers to the other linked
primitives, so that it's always possible to efficiently traverse
Voronoi graph.
There is also this link with a visual representation from that data structure.
Can someone point me to a reference implementation on how to construct a (multiplicatively and/or additively) weighted voronoi diagram, which is preferably based on Fortune's voronoi algorithm?
My goal:
Given a set of points(each point has a weight) and a set of boundary edges(usually a rectangle) I want to construct a weighted voronoi diagram using either python or the processing.org-framework. Here is an example.
What I have worked on so far:
So far I have implemented Fortune's algorithm as well as the "centroidal voronoi tessellation" presented in Michael Balzer's paper. Algorithm 3 states how the weights need to be adjusted, however, when I implement this my geometry does not work anymore. To fix this the sweep-line algorithm has to be updated to take weights into account, but I have been unable to do this so far.
Hence I would like to see how other people solved this problem.
For additively weighted Voronoi Diagram: Remember that a power diagram in dimension n is only a(n unweighted) Voronoi diagram in dimension n+1.
For that, just recall that the Voronoi diagram of a point set is invariant if you add any constant to the coordinates, and that the weighted Voronoi diagram can thus be written as a non weighted Voronoi diagram using the coordinates, for example in 2D lifted to 3D:
(x_i, y_i, sqrt(C - w_i))
where w_i is the weight of the seed, and C is any arbitrarily large constant (in practice, one just small enough such that C-w_i is positive).
Once your diagram is computed, just discard the last component.
So, basically, you only need to find a library that is able to handle Voronoi diagrams in dimension n+1 compared to your problem. CGAL can do that. This also makes the implementation extremely easy.
This computation is not easy, but it is available in CGAL. See the manual pages here.
See also the Effective Computational Geometry project, which employs and
supports CGAL:
There is little `off-the-shelf' open source code out there, for the case where distances to the centers are weighted with a multiplicative factor.
To my knowledge, none of the current CGAL packages covers this case.
Takashi Ohyama's beautifully colorful website provides java implementations
http://www.nirarebakun.com/voro/emwvoro.html
for up to 100 points with a SIMPLE algorithm (Euclidean and Manhattan distances).
There is also a paper describing this simple intersection algorithm and an approximate implementation within O(n^3) time, as a plugin to TerraView.
However, I cannot find the source of this plugin in the TerraView / TerraLib repository:
http://www.geoinfo.info/geoinfo2011/papers/mauricio1.pdf
Aurenhammer and Edelsbrunner describe an optimal n^2 time algorithm, but I'm unaware of available code of that.
If you are comfortable digging into Octave, you could reference the code provided in their library.
I'm writing an app that looks up points in two-dimensional space using a k-d tree. It would be nice, during development, to be able to "see" the nearest-neighbor zones surrounding each point.
In the attached image, the red points are points in the k-d tree, and the blue lines surrounding each point bound the zone where a nearest neighbor search will return the contained point.
The image was created thusly:
for each point in the space:
da = distance to nearest neighbor
db = distance to second-nearest neighbor
if absolute_value(da - db) < 4:
draw blue pixel
This algorithm has two problems:
(more important) It's slow on my (reasonably fast Core i7) computer.
(less important) It's sloppy, as you can see by the varying widths of the blue lines.
What is this "visualization" of a set of points called?
What are some good algorithms to create such a visualization?
This is called a Voronoi Diagram and there are many excellent algorithms for generating them efficiently. The one I've heard about most is Fortune's algorithm, which runs in time O(n log n), though others algorithms exist for this problem.
Hope this helps!
Jacob,
hey, you found an interesting way of generating this Voronoi diagram, even though it is not so efficient.
The less important issue first: the varying thickness boundaries that you get, those butterfly shapes, are in fact the area between the two branches of an hyperbola. Precisely the hyperbola given by the equation |da - db| = 4. To get a thick line instead, you have to modify this criterion and replace it by the distance to the bisector of the two nearest neighbors, let A and B; using vector calculus, | PA.AB/||AB|| - ||AB||/2 | < 4.
The more important issue: there are two well known efficient solutions to the construction of the Voronoi diagram of a set of points: Fortune's sweep algorithm (as mentioned by templatetypedef) and Preparata & Shamos' Divide & Conquer solutions. Both run in optimal time O(N.Lg(N)) for N points, but aren't so easy to implement.
These algorithm will construct the Voronoi diagram as a set of line segments and half-lines. Check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voronoi_diagram.
This paper "Primitives for the manipulation of general subdivisions and the computation of Voronoi" describes both algorithms using a somewhat high-level framework, caring about all implementation details; the article is difficult but the algorithms are implementable.
You may also have a look at "A straightforward iterative algorithm for the planar Voronoi diagram", which I never tried.
A totally different approach is to directly build the distance map from the given points for example by means of Dijkstra's algorithm: starting from the given points, you grow the boundary of the area within a given distance from every point and you stop growing when two boundaries meet. [More explanations required.] See http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-O6rXggLa9fE/TnAwz4f9hXI/AAAAAAAAAPk/0vrqEKRPVIw/s1600/distmap-20-seed4-fin.jpg
Another good starting point (for efficiently computing the distance map) can be "A general algorithm for computing distance transforms in linear time".
From personal experience: Fortune's algorithm is a pain to implement. The divide and conquer algorithm presented by Guibas and Stolfi isn't too bad; they give detailed pseudocode that's easy to transcribe into a procedural programming language. Both will blow up if you have nearly degenerate inputs and use floating point, but since the primitives are quadratic, if you can represent coordinates as 32-bit integers, then you can use 64 bits to carry out the determinant computations.
Once you get it working, you might consider replacing your kd-tree algorithms, which have a Theta(√n) worst case, with algorithms that work on planar subdivisions.
You can find a great implementation for it at D3.js library: http://mbostock.github.com/d3/ex/voronoi.html