convex hull of three orthogonal line segments - computational-geometry

I got three line segments in 3D. They are pairwise orthogonal but they don't need to touch. If they touch, the volume of the convex hull of them is 1/6*s1*s2*s3 where s1,s2,s3 are the lengths of the line segments. This can be easily computed. But what happens if they don't touch? I expect that the convex hull doesn't get smaller.
I would be grateful if anyone have an idea how to proof that or could give a counter example.

Lemma 6 from http://cms.math.ca/openaccess/cjm/v3/cjm1951v03.0054-0061.pdf gives the desired result. If we choose P and Q to be the endpoints of the longest line segments, then the projection in two dimensions contains the other line segments that are still orthogonal.

Related

How to find the narrowest band covering given points in the 2D space?

Given n points in the 2D space, I want the find the narrowest band covering these points. In other words, I want to find two parallel lines such that all points fall between these two lines. Are there exiting an effective algorithm?
First, these lines should go through the points that form the convex hull of our points. Convex hull could be found by many different algorithms. The choice depends on your data.
Second, one of our parallel lines will go through the convex hull segment. Because we can rotate both parallel lines decreasing a distance between them till we stop at the other point of the convex hull.
Now, we should iterate through all convex hull segments, and for every segment, build a line going through this segment, and find convex hull point that is farthest from this line. Minimum of all these distances (from the farthest point to the line) would be the answer. All this iteration can be done in linear time using rotating calipers (thanks to MBo).

Cut the Cake, or polygon decomposition

I'm facing the following problem: I'm given a set of coordinates on an integer grid that define the vertices of a polygon. The polygon is guaranteed to be convex. It's proven that such a polygon can always be cut into 4 equal area parts by 2 orthogonal lines. Let's call the point of these lines' intersection P.
Given that set, I should calculate the coordinates of P within the polygon and the angle the lines need to be turned on so that the lines cut the polygon into 4 equal parts.
I realise that, put generally, the cake cutting problem has no "good" solution. But this particular case of it should.
I've searched for an algorithm to solve that problem, but found nothing useful.
Where should I look?
My approach would be to calculate the coordinates of the centre of the polygon (that can be done more or less easily), place Pthere and then "wiggle" the lines until the areas of the parts match. But that sounds too inelegant.
UPD: that's the problem I'm dealing with. Perhaps this question should be suspended until I come up with actual code questions.
Here is a partial sketch of the solution:
Choose an arbitrary direction and find the line parallel to that direction that splits the polygon in two. To achieve this, draw a line by every vertex to decompose the polygon in slabs. The respective areas of the slabs will tell you what slab the desired line intersects. Simple linear interpolation will give the exact location of the line.
Now your polygon is split in two convex polygons. For each halve, repeat the above procedure using the perpendicular direction. In general, you will get two distinct splitters, and what remains to be done is to find the direction such that they do coincide.
In the given direction, the splitters intersect four specific edges of the polygon. If you slightly rotate, they still intersect the same four edges. You can decompose a full turn in angular ranges such that the four intersected edges remain the same.
Knowing the four intersected edges, you can establish the relation that tells you the distance between the two perpendicular splitters as a function of the angle. Then you can compute the angle at which the two splitters coincide, and check if this angle belongs to the range defined for these edges.
By trying all ranges in turn, you will find the solution.
Note: the limits of the angular ranges correspond to directions parallel or perpendicular to the lines joining two vertexes.

Find all polygons in points using MATLAB

I have a set of points in the plane and I want to find all convex polygons without including a point inside them.
For example I want to find all triangles, all four sized polygons, all four five sized polygons and so on until is possible to find them without including a point inside them.
In the image, row a corresponds to convex polygons of size 3. While column 1 and 2 show correct examples of what I want, column 3 shows a triangle including two points inside of it, which I dont want.
Rows b and c show examples of polygons of size 4 and 5.
b3 shows an example of a non convex polygon
I wonder if there is a function in MATLAB or any other language or if someone knows about an algorithm that can do it.
The algorithm could receive, beside the points, the size of the polygons to search, it would return all possibly correct polygons or empty if does not contain any polygon of that size.
I appreciate the help.
Step 1: Perform a Delaunay-Triangulation of the points.
Step 2:
For polygons of size 3: resulting triangles are the result.
For polygons of size 4: pick any pair of triangles that share two corners
For polygons of size 5: pick any polygon of size 4 and pair it with a
triangle that shares exactly two corners
You can try the naive solution if it is feasible :-
select k points for k sided polygon
apply convex hull alogrithm on it
if convex hull size equal k then the set of points form desired k sided polygon.
Time Complexity:- O(2^N*N*logN)

How to find convex hull in a 3 dimensional space

Given a set of points S (x, y, z). How to find the convex hull of those points ?
I tried understanding the algorithm from here, but could not get much.
It says:
First project all of the points onto the xy-plane, and find an edge that is definitely on the hull by selecting the point with highest y-coordinate and then doing one iteration of gift wrapping to determine the other endpoint of the edge. This is the first part of the incomplete hull. We then build the hull iteratively. Consider this first edge; now find another point in order to form the first triangular face of the hull. We do this by picking the point such that all the other points lie to the right of this triangle, when viewed appropriately (just as in the gift-wrapping algorithm, in which we picked an edge such that all other points lay to the right of that edge). Now there are three edges in the hull; to continue, we pick one of them arbitrarily, and again scan through all the points to find another point to build a new triangle with this edge, and repeat this until there are no edges left. (When we create a new triangular face, we add two edges to the pool; however, we have to first check if they have already been added to the hull, in which case we ignore them.) There are O(n) faces, and each iteration takes O(n) time since we must scan all of the remaining points, giving O(n2).
Can anyone explain it in a more clearer way or suggest a simpler alternative approach.
Implementing the 3D convex hull is not easy, but many algorithms have been implemented, and code is widely available. At the high end of quality and time investment to use is CGAL. At the lower end on both measures is my own C code:
In between there is code all over the web, including this implementation of QuickHull.
I would suggest first try an easier approach like quick hull. (Btw, the order for gift wrapping is O(nh) not O(n2), where h is points on hull and order of quick hull is O(n log n)).
Under average circumstances quick hull works quite well, but processing usually becomes slow in cases of high symmetry or points lying on the circumference of a circle. Quick hull can be broken down to the following steps:
Find the points with minimum and maximum x coordinates, those are
bound to be part of the convex.
Use the line formed by the two points to divide the set in two
subsets of points, which will be processed recursively.
Determine the point, on one side of the line, with the maximum
distance from the line. The two points found before along with this
one form a triangle.
The points lying inside of that triangle cannot be part of the
convex hull and can therefore be ignored in the next steps.
Repeat the previous two steps on the two lines formed by the
triangle (not the initial line).
Keep on doing so on until no more points are left, the recursion has
come to an end and the points selected constitute the convex hull.
See this impementaion and explanation for 3d convex hull using quick hull algorithm.
Gift wrapping algorithm:
Jarvis's match algorithm is like wrapping a piece of string around the points. It starts by computing the leftmost point l, since we know that the left most point must be a convex hull vertex.This process will take linear time.Then the algorithm does a series of pivoting steps to find each successive convex hull vertex untill the next vertex is the original leftmost point again.
The algorithm find the successive convex hull vertex like this: the vertex immediately following a point p is the point that appears to be furthest to the right to someone standing at p and looking at the other points. In other words, if q is the vertex following p, and r is any other input point, then the triple p, q, r is in counter-clockwise order. We can find each successive vertex in linear time by performing a series of O(n) counter-clockwise tests.
Since the algorithm spends O(n) time for each convex hull vertex, the worst-case running time is O(n2). However, if the convex hull has very few vertices, Jarvis's march is extremely fast. A better way to write the running time is O(nh), where h is the number of convex hull vertices. In the worst case, h = n, and we get our old O(n2) time bound, but in the best case h = 3, and the algorithm only needs O(n) time. This is a so called output-sensitive algorithm, the smaller the output, the faster the algorithm.
The following image should give you more idea
GPL C++ code for finding 3D convex hulls is available at http://www.newtonapples.net/code/NewtonAppleWrapper_11Feb2016.tar.gz and a description of the O(n log(n)) algorithm at http://www.newtonapples.net/NewtonAppleWrapper.html
One of the simplest algorithms for convex hull computation in 3D was presented in the paper The QuickHull algorithm for Convex Hulls by Barber, etc from 1995. Unfortunately the original paper lacks any figures to simplify its understanding.
The algorithm works iteratively by storing boundary faces of some convex set with the vertices from the subset of original points. The remaining points are divided on the ones already inside the current convex set and the points outside it. And each step consists in enlarging the convex set by including one of outside points in it until no one remains.
The authors propose to start the algorithm in 3D from any tetrahedron with 4 vertices in original points. If these vertices are selected so that they are on the boundary of convex hull then it will accelerate the algorithm (they will not be removed from boundary during the following steps). Also the algorithm can start from the boundary surface containing just 2 oppositely oriented triangles with 3 vertices in original points. Such points can be selected as follows.
The first point has with the minimal (x,y,z) coordinates, if compare coordinates lexicographically.
The second point is the most distant from the first one.
The third point is the most distant from the line through the first two points.
The next figure presents initial points and the starting 2 oppositely oriented triangles:
The remaining points are subdivided in two sets:
Black points - above the plane containing the triangles - are associated with the triangle having normal oriented upward.
Red points - below the plane containing the triangles - are associated with the triangle having normal oriented downward.
On the following steps, the algorithm always associates each point currently outside the convex set with one of the boundary triangles that is "visible" from the point (point is within positive half-space of that triangle). More precisely each outside point is associated with the triangle, for which the distance between the point and the plane containing the triangle is the largest.
On each step of algorithm the furthest outside point is selected, then all faces of the current convex set visible from it are identified, these faces are removed from the convex set and replaced with the triangles having one vertex in furthest point and two other points on the horizon ridge (boundary of removed visible faces).
On the next figure the furthest point is pointed by green arrow and three visible triangles are highlighted in red:
Visible triangles deleted, back faces and inside points can be seen in the hole, horizon ridge is shown with red color:
5 new triangles (joining at the added point) patch the hole in the surface:
The points previously associated with the removed triangles are either become inner for the updated convex set or redistributed among new triangles.
The last figure also presents the final result of convex hull computation without any remaining outside points. (The figures were prepared in MeshInspector application, having this algorithm implemented.)

Finding intersection points of line paths

I have two Bezier curves which share an end point. Each of these curves has an "extension" on both the left and right sides, similar to the edges of a road. The extensions are made of line segments that approximate the Bezier curve.
I want to find the closest intersection point of these paths to the shared end point of the bezier curves.
Here is a diagram I've drawn of the problem
Each line path has over 100 vertices, so intersecting each line and keeping the closest intersection point can become very slow, given that this must run in real-time.
I've run a bounding sphere intersection test on the lines before checking for an intersection point to speed things up a little, but it's still not quick enough. My next approach would be to use some sort of quadtree structure.
I've looked up the Bentley-Ottmann algorithm but it seems to deal with finding all intersections in one set of lines, which isn't what I need. I've also looked up Bezier curve intersection algorithms but they seem to require subdivision into line segments, which I already have.
Are there any useful algorithms for this problem, or perhaps any ideas on how it might be optimised?
Given two curves A and B with extension widths Aw and Bw. Find the point A' which is the distance Bw along A from the shared node N. Find the point B' which is likewise the distance Aw along B from the shared node N. Now, given the points N, A' and B', find the fourth point N' which forms a parallelogram with the other three nodes. This point N' is the intersection.

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