3D Connected Points Labeling based on Euclidean distances - algorithm

Currently, I am working on a project that is trying to group 3d points from a dataset by specifying connectivity as a minimum euclidean distance. My algorithm right now is simply a 3d adaptation of the naive flood fill.
size_t PointSegmenter::growRegion(size_t & seed, size_t segNumber) {
size_t numPointsLabeled = 0;
//alias for points to avoid retyping
vector<Point3d> & points = _img.points;
deque<size_t> ptQueue;
ptQueue.push_back(seed);
points[seed].setLabel(segNumber);
while (!ptQueue.empty()) {
size_t currentIdx = ptQueue.front();
ptQueue.pop_front();
points[currentIdx].setLabel(segNumber);
numPointsLabeled++;
vector<int> newPoints = _img.queryRadius(currentIdx, SEGMENT_MAX_DISTANCE, MATCH_ACCURACY);
for (int i = 0; i < (int)newPoints.size(); i++) {
int newIdx = newPoints[i];
Point3d &newPoint = points[newIdx];
if(!newPoint.labeled()) {
newPoint.setLabel(segNumber);
ptQueue.push_back(newIdx);
}
}
}
//NOTE to whoever wrote the other code, the compiler optimizes i++
//to ++i in cases like these, so please don't change them just for speed :)
for (size_t i = seed; i < points.size(); i++) {
if(!points[i].labeled()) {
//search for an unlabeled point to serve as the next seed.
seed = i;
return numPointsLabeled;
}
}
return numPointsLabeled;
}
Where this code snippet is ran again for the new seed, and _img.queryRadius() is a fixed radius search with the ANN library:
vector<int> Image::queryRadius(size_t index, double range, double epsilon) {
int k = kdTree->annkFRSearch(dataPts[index], range*range, 0);
ANNidxArray nnIdx = new ANNidx[k];
kdTree->annkFRSearch(dataPts[index], range*range, k, nnIdx);
vector<int> outPoints;
outPoints.reserve(k);
for(int i = 0; i < k; i++) {
outPoints.push_back(nnIdx[i]);
}
delete[] nnIdx;
return outPoints;
}
My problem with this code is that it runs waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too slow for large datasets. If I'm not mistaken, this code will do a search for every single point, and the searches are O(NlogN), giving this a time complexity of (N^2*log(N)).
In addition to that, deletions are relatively expensive if I remember right from KD trees, but also not deleting points creates problems in that each point can be searched hundreds of times, by every neighbor close to it.
So my question is, is there a better way to do this? Especially in a way that will grow linearly with the dataset?
Thanks for any help you may be able to provide
EDIT
I have tried using a simple sorted list like dash-tom-bang said, but the result was even slower than what I was using before. I'm not sure if it was the implementation, or it was just simply too slow to iterate through every point and check euclidean distance (even when just using squared distance.
Is there any other ideas people may have? I'm honestly stumped right now.

I propose the following algorithm:
Compute 3D Delaunay triangulation of your data points.
Remove all the edges that are longer than your threshold distance, O(N) when combined with step 3.
Find connected components in the resulting graph which is O(N) in size, this is done in O(N α(N)).
The bottleneck is step 1 which can be done in O(N2) or even O(N log N) according to this page http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/conf/SANTA_FE_CD-ROM/sf_papers/lattuada_roberto/paper.html. However it's definitely not a 100 lines algorithm.

When I did something along these lines, I chose an "origin" outside of the dataset somewhere and sorted all of the points by their distance to that origin. Then I had a much smaller set of points to choose from at each step, and I only had to go through the "onion skin" region around the point being considered. You would check neighboring points until the distance to the closest point is less than the width of the range you're checking.
While that worked well for me, a similar version of that can be achieved by sorting all of your points along one axis (which would represent the "origin" being infinitely far away) and then just checking points again until your "search width" exceeds the distance to the closest point so far found.

Points should be better organized. To search more efficiently instead of a vector<Point3d> you need some sort of a hash map where hash collision implies that two points are close to each other (so you use hash collisions to your advantage). You can for instance divide the space into cubes of size equal to SEGMENT_MAX_DISTANCE, and use a hash function that returns a triplet of ints instead of just an int, where each part of a triplet is calculated as point.<corresponding_dimension> / SEGMENT_MAX_DISTANCE.
Now for each point in this new set you search only for points in the same cube, and in adjacent cubes of space. This greatly reduces the search space.

Related

Can I efficiently construct a Voronoi diagram / Delaunay mesh from a subset of points?

I have a problem where I have a large number (~10,000) points (in 2-D) from which I need to repeatedly pick a small number (~100) and construct a Voronoi diagram.
I can pre-compute the Voronoi diagram / Delaunay mesh for the 10000 points which always remain the same. Is there then a way to efficiently compute the Voronoi diagram for a small subset of these points? Or do I need to start from scratch every time?
Many thanks!
Generally speaking, you see the term "dynamic algorithms" used to describe the process of taking an algorithm where the input is typically always known up front and modify it to handle the case where the underlying data change. In your case, you're looking for "dynamic Voronoi diagrams," which are data structures that maintain Voronoi diagrams even as nodes are added and deleted.
I am not particularly familiar with dynamic computational geometry algorithms, but a bit of Googling turned up a couple of hits for "dynamic Voronoi diagrams," including this paper by Gowda, Kirkpatrick, et al describing one approach. It may not end up being faster in your case than just computing the full Voronoi diagram, but it could be useful as a starting point for a search.
For such a small input set (100 vertices) just building a Delauany mesh/Voronoi diagram from scratch should be reasonably fast. While I don't pretend to have an exhaustive knowledge of the algorithms that exist today, my experience with the Delaunay is that the logic for removing vertices from a mesh tends to be more expensive than adding to the mesh. So the approach of creating a mesh of 100 points from a mesh of 10000 by removing vertices probably would not succeed.
Here's a sample of Java code using the Tinfour library. Building 1000 Voronoi diagrams required only 277 milliseconds on a middle-of-the-road laptop computer. The focus of the Tinfour library is the Delaunay rather than the Voronoi, but it does include a so-so class for building a Voronoi from a Delaunay mesh. I think that any good computational geometry library you find should yield similar performance.
public static void main(String[] args) {
int seed = 0;
List<Vertex> masterList = TestVertices.makeRandomVertices(10000, seed);
int nTrials = 1000;
int nVerticesInSubset = 100;
int nPolygons = 0;
Random random = new Random(seed);
long time0 = System.nanoTime();
for (int iTrial = 0; iTrial < nTrials; iTrial++) {
// we wish to build a subset of N unique vertices.
// the bitSet allows us to avoid randomly selecting
// a vertex more than once.
BitSet bitSet = new BitSet(10000);
ArrayList<Vertex> subList = new ArrayList<>();
for (int i = 0; i < nVerticesInSubset; i++) {
while (true) {
int index = random.nextInt(masterList.size());
// the random index is a value in the range 0 to 10000.
// see if the corresponding vertex has already been selected
// if not, add it to the subList. if so, keep looking
if (!bitSet.get(index)) {
subList.add(masterList.get(index));
bitSet.set(index);
break;
}
}
}
IncrementalTin tin = new IncrementalTin(0.001);
tin.add(subList, null);
BoundedVoronoiDiagram voronoi = new BoundedVoronoiDiagram(tin);
nPolygons += voronoi.getPolygons().size();
}
long time1 = System.nanoTime();
System.out.println("Elapsed time in milliseconds " + (time1 - time0) / 1.0e+6);
System.out.println("Avg. polygons in Voronoi " + ((double) nPolygons / nTrials));
}

Nearest Neighbors in CUDA Particles

Edit 2: Please take a look at this crosspost for TLDR.
Edit: Given that the particles are segmented into grid cells (say 16^3 grid), is it a better idea to let run one work-group for each grid cell and as many work-items in one work-group as there can be maximal number of particles per grid cell?
In that case I could load all particles from neighboring cells into local memory and iterate through them computing some properties. Then I could write specific value into each particle in the current grid cell.
Would this approach be beneficial over running the kernel for all particles and for each iterating over (most of the time the same) neighbors?
Also, what is the ideal ratio of number of particles/number of grid cells?
I'm trying to reimplement (and modify) CUDA Particles for OpenCL and use it to query nearest neighbors for every particle. I've created the following structures:
Buffer P holding all particles' 3D positions (float3)
Buffer Sp storing int2 pairs of particle ids and their spatial hashes. Sp is sorted according to the hash. (The hash is just a simple linear mapping from 3D to 1D – no Z-indexing yet.)
Buffer L storing int2 pairs of starting and ending positions of particular spatial hashes in buffer Sp. Example: L[12] = (int2)(0, 50).
L[12].x is the index (in Sp) of the first particle with spatial hash 12.
L[12].y is the index (in Sp) of the last particle with spatial hash 12.
Now that I have all these buffers, I want to iterate through all the particles in P and for each particle iterate through its nearest neighbors. Currently I have a kernel that looks like this (pseudocode):
__kernel process_particles(float3* P, int2* Sp, int2* L, int* Out) {
size_t gid = get_global_id(0);
float3 curr_particle = P[gid];
int processed_value = 0;
for(int x=-1; x<=1; x++)
for(int y=-1; y<=1; y++)
for(int z=-1; z<=1; z++) {
float3 neigh_position = curr_particle + (float3)(x,y,z)*GRID_CELL_SIDE;
// ugly boundary checking
if ( dot(neigh_position<0, (float3)(1)) +
dot(neigh_position>BOUNDARY, (float3)(1)) != 0)
continue;
int neigh_hash = spatial_hash( neigh_position );
int2 particles_range = L[ neigh_hash ];
for(int p=particles_range.x; p<particles_range.y; p++)
processed_value += heavy_computation( P[ Sp[p].y ] );
}
Out[gid] = processed_value;
}
The problem with that code is that it's slow. I suspect the nonlinear GPU memory access (particulary P[Sp[p].y] in the inner-most for loop) to be causing the slowness.
What I want to do is to use Z-order curve as the spatial hash. That way I could have only 1 for loop iterating through a continuous range of memory when querying neighbors. The only problem is that I don't know what should be the start and stop Z-index values.
The holy grail I want to achieve:
__kernel process_particles(float3* P, int2* Sp, int2* L, int* Out) {
size_t gid = get_global_id(0);
float3 curr_particle = P[gid];
int processed_value = 0;
// How to accomplish this??
// `get_neighbors_range()` returns start and end Z-index values
// representing the start and end near neighbors cells range
int2 nearest_neighboring_cells_range = get_neighbors_range(curr_particle);
int first_particle_id = L[ nearest_neighboring_cells_range.x ].x;
int last_particle_id = L[ nearest_neighboring_cells_range.y ].y;
for(int p=first_particle_id; p<=last_particle_id; p++) {
processed_value += heavy_computation( P[ Sp[p].y ] );
}
Out[gid] = processed_value;
}
You should study the Morton Code algorithms closely. Ericsons Real time collision detection explains that very well.
Ericson - Real time Collision detection
Here is another nice explanation including some tests:
Morton encoding/decoding through bit interleaving: Implementations
Z-Order algorithms only defines the paths of the coordinates in which you can hash from 2 or 3D coordinates to just an integer. Although the algorithm goes deeper for every iteration you have to set the limits yourself. Usually the stop index is denoted by a sentinel. Letting the sentinel stop will tell you at which level the particle is placed. So the maximum level you want to define will tell you the number of cells per dimension. For example with maximum level at 6 you have 2^6 = 64. You will have 64x64x64 cells in your system (3D). That also means that you have to use integer based coordinates. If you use floats you have to convert like coord.x = 64*float_x and so on.
If you know how many cells you have in your system you can define your limits. Are you trying to use a binary octree?
Since particles are in motion (in that CUDA example) you should try to parallelize over the number of particles instead of cells.
If you want to build lists of nearest neighbours you have to map the particles to cells. This is done through a table that is sorted afterwards by cells to particles. Still you should iterate through the particles and access its neighbours.
About your code:
The problem with that code is that it's slow. I suspect the nonlinear GPU memory access (particulary P[Sp[p].y] in the inner-most for loop) to be causing the slowness.
Remember Donald Knuth. You should measure where the bottle neck is. You can use NVCC Profiler and look for bottleneck. Not sure what OpenCL has as profiler.
// ugly boundary checking
if ( dot(neigh_position<0, (float3)(1)) +
dot(neigh_position>BOUNDARY, (float3)(1)) != 0)
continue;
I think you should not branch it that way, how about returning zero when you call heavy_computation. Not sure, but maybe you have sort of a branch prediction here. Try to remove that somehow.
Running parallel over the cells is a good idea only if you have no write accesses to the particle data, otherwise you will have to use atomics. If you go over the particle range instead you read accesses to the cells and neighbours but you create your sum in parallel and you are not forced to some race condiction paradigm.
Also, what is the ideal ratio of number of particles/number of grid cells?
Really depends on your algorithms and the particle packing within your domain, but in your case I would define the cell size equivalent to the particle diameter and just use the number of cells you get.
So if you want to use Z-order and achieve your holy grail, try to use integer coordinates and hash them.
Also try to use larger amounts of particles. About 65000 particles like CUDA examples uses you should consider because that way the parallelisation is mostly efficient; the running processing units are exploited (fewer idles threads).

Firefly algorithm: How to understand the movement formula

The standard move formula for the firefly algorithm looks like this:
x_i^{t+1} = x_i^t + \beta_0 e^{-\gamma {r_{i,j}^2}}(x_j^t - x_i^t) + \alpha \epsilon_i^t
While I understand the idea of the algorithm and also what the single components of the formula are supposed to do, i have trouble transforming the formula into a working implementation.
To be specific:
1) beta0 should be the "attractiveness at the source", so when moving firefly i towards firefly j, a higher beta0 means moving ffi farther towards ffj.
But when performing minimization, higher fitness values indicate a worse solution, thus ffi should move less towards ffj.
So I guess, beta0 should be a value from 0 to 1, closer to 1 for better solutions. So how do I map minimization fitness values (including negative fitness values) to a 0-1 scale?
2) Does every firefly move towards every other firefly, or does every firefly only move towards the brightest one it sees? Most papers suggest two nested loops over all population members, but this also implies moving towards worse solutions (of course, beta0 could minimize the movement toward such bad solutions)
3) If you move every firefly towards every other firefly, do you add the random value every time, or only once per firefly and iteration?
Basically, i want the following snippet of code to do the movement:
void MoveFireFlies(double alpha, double gamma, double*** rand, double** NewPopulation, double** Population, double* Fitness, int populationSize, int dimensions)
{
int i;
for(i=0;i<populationSize;i++)
{
int j;
for(j=0; j<populationSize; j++)
{
double beta0 = 1.0;
double distance = [...] //euclidian distance between ffi and ffj
double factor = exp(-gamma * distance * distance);
int d;
for(d=0;d<dimensions;d++)
{
NewPopulation[i][d] = Population[i][d] + beta0 * factor * (Population[j][d] - Population[i][d]) + alpha * rand[i][j][d];
}
}
}
}
where rand contains random values in the range (-0.5,0.5), and Population contains the solutions of the previous iteration. The Fitness values are provided but currently not used anywhere. Of course, this codesnippet does not perform any kind of viable optimization at the moment.
Any help is greatly appreciated, I am working on this for quite some time and start to despair.
a paper concerning the firefly algorithm:
Firefly Algorithm: Recent Advances and Applications
First, there is difference between light intensity (brightness) and attractiveness. Light intensity is calculated with objective function. If the problem is about founding maximum global optimum, then you have to make light intensity directly proportional to objective function's value. Otherwise, light intensity must be inversly proportional to objective function's value.
On the other hand, attractiveness is not related to fitness value. Beta0 is not considired as fitness, Beta0 is a parameter that must be defined at the beginning as well as Alpha and Gamma parameters.
In case you have a minimization problem and you consider that objective function as a fitness value, then the firefly with higher fitness value will attract to less one.
Yes, every firefly moves towards every other firefly, but when you get a new solution, you have to perform a greedy selection between old and new one and keep only the best among them.
Yes, you have to generate a new random value everytime.

Datastructure and algorithm to detect collisions of irregular shaped moving objects

I came across this interview question
Many irregularly shaped objects are moving in random directions. Provide a data structure and algorithm to detect collisions. Remember that the number of objects is in the millions.
I am assuming that every object would have an x and y coordinate. Other assumptions are most welcome. Also a certain kind of tree should be used, I suppose, but I am clueless about the algorithm.
Any suggestions?
I would have a look at the Plane Sweep Algorithm or the Bently-Ottmann Algorithm. It uses plane sweep to determine in O(n log(n)) time (and O(n) space) the intersection of lines on a euclidian plane.
Most likely what you want is to sub-divide the plane with a space-filling-curve like a z-curve or a hilbert-curve and thus reducing the complexity of a 2D problem to a 1D problem. Look for quadtree.
Link: http://dmytry.com/texts/collision_detection_using_z_order_curve_aka_Morton_order.html
There are many solutions to this problem. First: Use bounding boxes or circles (balls in 3D). If the bounding boxes do not intersect then no further tests are needed. Second: Subdivide your space. You do not have to test every object against all other objects (that is O(n^2)). You can have an average complexity of O(n) with quadtrees.
I guess there should be a loop which takes reference of 1 object find co-ordinates and then checks with rest of all other objects to see if there is any collision. I am not sure how good my solution is for millions of objects.
Psuedo-code:
For each irregular shaped object1
int left1, left2;
int right1, right2;
int top1, top2;
int bottom1, bottom2;
bool bRet = 1; // No collision
left1 = object1->x;
right1 = object1->x + object1->width;
top1 = object1->y;
bottom1 = object1->y + object1->height;
For each irregular shaped object2
{
left2 = object2->x;
right2 = object2->x + object2->width;
top2 = object2->y;
bottom2 = object2->y + object2->height;
if (bottom1 < top2) bRet =0;
if (top1 > bottom2) bRet = 0;
if (right1 < left2) bRet = 0;
if (left1 > right2) bRet = 0;
}
return bRet;

Data structure for storing thousands of vectors

I have upto 10,000 randomly positioned points in a space and i need to be able to tell which the cursor is closest to at any given time. To add some context, the points are in the form of a vector drawing, so they can be constantly and quickly added and removed by the user and also potentially be unbalanced across the canvas space..
I am therefore trying to find the most efficient data structure for storing and querying these points. I would like to keep this question language agnostic if possible.
After the Update to the Question
Use two Red-Black Tree or Skip_list maps. Both are compact self-balancing data structures giving you O(log n) time for search, insert and delete operations. One map will use X-coordinate for every point as a key and the point itself as a value and the other will use Y-coordinate as a key and the point itself as a value.
As a trade-off I suggest to initially restrict the search area around the cursor by a square. For perfect match the square side should equal to diameter of your "sensitivity circle” around the cursor. I.e. if you’re interested only in a nearest neighbour within 10 pixel radius from the cursor then the square side needs to be 20px. As an alternative, if you’re after nearest neighbour regardless of proximity you might try finding the boundary dynamically by evaluating floor and ceiling relative to cursor.
Then retrieve two subsets of points from the maps that are within the boundaries, merge to include only the points within both sub sets.
Loop through the result, calculate proximity to each point (dx^2+dy^2, avoid square root since you're not interested in the actual distance, just proximity), find the nearest neighbour.
Take root square from the proximity figure to measure the distance to the nearest neighbour, see if it’s greater than the radius of the “sensitivity circle”, if it is it means there is no points within the circle.
I suggest doing some benchmarks every approach; it’s two easy to go over the top with optimisations. On my modest hardware (Duo Core 2) naïve single-threaded search of a nearest neighbour within 10K points repeated a thousand times takes 350 milliseconds in Java. As long as the overall UI re-action time is under 100 milliseconds it will seem instant to a user, keeping that in mind even naïve search might give you sufficiently fast response.
Generic Solution
The most efficient data structure depends on the algorithm you’re planning to use, time-space trade off and the expected relative distribution of points:
If space is not an issue the most efficient way may be to pre-calculate the nearest neighbour for each point on the screen and then store nearest neighbour unique id in a two-dimensional array representing the screen.
If time is not an issue storing 10K points in a simple 2D array and doing naïve search every time, i.e. looping through each point and calculating the distance may be a good and simple easy to maintain option.
For a number of trade-offs between the two, here is a good presentation on various Nearest Neighbour Search options available: http://dimacs.rutgers.edu/Workshops/MiningTutorial/pindyk-slides.ppt
A bunch of good detailed materials for various Nearest Neighbour Search algorithms: http://simsearch.yury.name/tutorial.html, just pick one that suits your needs best.
So it's really impossible to evaluate the data structure is isolation from algorithm which in turn is hard to evaluate without good idea of task constraints and priorities.
Sample Java Implementation
import java.util.*;
import java.util.concurrent.ConcurrentSkipListMap;
class Test
{
public static void main (String[] args)
{
Drawing naive = new NaiveDrawing();
Drawing skip = new SkipListDrawing();
long start;
start = System.currentTimeMillis();
testInsert(naive);
System.out.println("Naive insert: "+(System.currentTimeMillis() - start)+"ms");
start = System.currentTimeMillis();
testSearch(naive);
System.out.println("Naive search: "+(System.currentTimeMillis() - start)+"ms");
start = System.currentTimeMillis();
testInsert(skip);
System.out.println("Skip List insert: "+(System.currentTimeMillis() - start)+"ms");
start = System.currentTimeMillis();
testSearch(skip);
System.out.println("Skip List search: "+(System.currentTimeMillis() - start)+"ms");
}
public static void testInsert(Drawing d)
{
Random r = new Random();
for (int i=0;i<100000;i++)
d.addPoint(new Point(r.nextInt(4096),r.nextInt(2048)));
}
public static void testSearch(Drawing d)
{
Point cursor;
Random r = new Random();
for (int i=0;i<1000;i++)
{
cursor = new Point(r.nextInt(4096),r.nextInt(2048));
d.getNearestFrom(cursor,10);
}
}
}
// A simple point class
class Point
{
public Point (int x, int y)
{
this.x = x;
this.y = y;
}
public final int x,y;
public String toString()
{
return "["+x+","+y+"]";
}
}
// Interface will make the benchmarking easier
interface Drawing
{
void addPoint (Point p);
Set<Point> getNearestFrom (Point source,int radius);
}
class SkipListDrawing implements Drawing
{
// Helper class to store an index of point by a single coordinate
// Unlike standard Map it's capable of storing several points against the same coordinate, i.e.
// [10,15] [10,40] [10,49] all can be stored against X-coordinate and retrieved later
// This is achieved by storing a list of points against the key, as opposed to storing just a point.
private class Index
{
final private NavigableMap<Integer,List<Point>> index = new ConcurrentSkipListMap <Integer,List<Point>> ();
void add (Point p,int indexKey)
{
List<Point> list = index.get(indexKey);
if (list==null)
{
list = new ArrayList<Point>();
index.put(indexKey,list);
}
list.add(p);
}
HashSet<Point> get (int fromKey,int toKey)
{
final HashSet<Point> result = new HashSet<Point> ();
// Use NavigableMap.subMap to quickly retrieve all entries matching
// search boundaries, then flatten resulting lists of points into
// a single HashSet of points.
for (List<Point> s: index.subMap(fromKey,true,toKey,true).values())
for (Point p: s)
result.add(p);
return result;
}
}
// Store each point index by it's X and Y coordinate in two separate indices
final private Index xIndex = new Index();
final private Index yIndex = new Index();
public void addPoint (Point p)
{
xIndex.add(p,p.x);
yIndex.add(p,p.y);
}
public Set<Point> getNearestFrom (Point origin,int radius)
{
final Set<Point> searchSpace;
// search space is going to contain only the points that are within
// "sensitivity square". First get all points where X coordinate
// is within the given range.
searchSpace = xIndex.get(origin.x-radius,origin.x+radius);
// Then get all points where Y is within the range, and store
// within searchSpace the intersection of two sets, i.e. only
// points where both X and Y are within the range.
searchSpace.retainAll(yIndex.get(origin.y-radius,origin.y+radius));
// Loop through search space, calculate proximity to each point
// Don't take square root as it's expensive and really unneccessary
// at this stage.
//
// Keep track of nearest points list if there are several
// at the same distance.
int dist,dx,dy, minDist = Integer.MAX_VALUE;
Set<Point> nearest = new HashSet<Point>();
for (Point p: searchSpace)
{
dx=p.x-origin.x;
dy=p.y-origin.y;
dist=dx*dx+dy*dy;
if (dist<minDist)
{
minDist=dist;
nearest.clear();
nearest.add(p);
}
else if (dist==minDist)
{
nearest.add(p);
}
}
// Ok, now we have the list of nearest points, it might be empty.
// But let's check if they are still beyond the sensitivity radius:
// we search area we have evaluated was square with an side to
// the diameter of the actual circle. If points we've found are
// in the corners of the square area they might be outside the circle.
// Let's see what the distance is and if it greater than the radius
// then we don't have a single point within proximity boundaries.
if (Math.sqrt(minDist) > radius) nearest.clear();
return nearest;
}
}
// Naive approach: just loop through every point and see if it's nearest.
class NaiveDrawing implements Drawing
{
final private List<Point> points = new ArrayList<Point> ();
public void addPoint (Point p)
{
points.add(p);
}
public Set<Point> getNearestFrom (Point origin,int radius)
{
int prevDist = Integer.MAX_VALUE;
int dist;
Set<Point> nearest = Collections.emptySet();
for (Point p: points)
{
int dx = p.x-origin.x;
int dy = p.y-origin.y;
dist = dx * dx + dy * dy;
if (dist < prevDist)
{
prevDist = dist;
nearest = new HashSet<Point>();
nearest.add(p);
}
else if (dist==prevDist) nearest.add(p);
}
if (Math.sqrt(prevDist) > radius) nearest = Collections.emptySet();
return nearest;
}
}
I would like to suggest creating a Voronoi Diagram and a Trapezoidal Map (Basically the same answer as I gave to this question). The Voronoi Diagram will partition the space in polygons. Every point will have a polygon describing all points that are closest to it.
Now when you get a query of a point, you need to find in which polygon it lies. This problem is called Point Location and can be solved by constructing a Trapezoidal Map.
The Voronoi Diagram can be created using Fortune's algorithm which takes O(n log n) computational steps and costs O(n) space.
This website shows you how to make a trapezoidal map and how to query it. You can also find some bounds there:
Expected creation time: O(n log n)
Expected space complexity: O(n) But
most importantly, expected query
time: O(log n).
(This is (theoretically) better than O(√n) of the kD-tree.)
Updating will be linear (O(n)) I think.
My source(other than the links above) is: Computational Geometry: algorithms and applications, chapters six and seven.
There you will find detailed information about the two data structures (including detailed proofs). The Google books version only has a part of what you need, but the other links should be sufficient for your purpose. Just buy the book if you are interested in that sort of thing (it's a good book).
The most efficient data structure would be a kd-tree link text
Are the points uniformly distributed?
You could build a quad-tree up to a certain depth, say, 8. At the top you have a tree node that divides the screen into four quadrants. Store at each node:
The top left and the bottom right coordinate
Pointers to four child nodes, which divide the node into four quadrants
Build the tree up to a depth of 8, say, and at the leaf nodes, store a list of points associated with that region. That list you can search linearly.
If you need more granularity, build the quad-tree to a greater depth.
It depends on the frequency of updates and query. For fast query, slow updates, a Quadtree (which is a form of jd-tree for 2-D) would probably be best. Quadtree are very good for non-uniform point too.
If you have a low resolution you could consider using a raw array of width x height of pre-computed values.
If you have very few points or fast update, a simple array is enough, or may be a simple partitioning (which goes toward the quadtree).
So the answer depends on parameters of you dynamics. Also I would add that nowadays the algo isn't everything; making it use multiple processors or CUDA can give a huge boost.
You haven't specified the dimensions of you points, but if it's a 2D line drawing then a bitmap bucket - a 2D array of lists of points in a region, where you scan the buckets corresponding to and near to a cursor can perform very well. Most systems will happily handle bitmap buckets of the 100x100 to 1000x1000 order, the small end of which would put a mean of one point per bucket. Although asymptotic performance is O(N), real-world performance is typically very good. Moving individual points between buckets can be fast; moving objects around can also be made fast if you put the objects into the buckets rather than the points ( so a polygon of 12 points would be referenced by 12 buckets; moving it becomes 12 times the insertion and removal cost of the bucket list; looking up the bucket is constant time in the 2D array ). The major cost is reorganising everything if the canvas size grows in many small jumps.
If it is in 2D, you can create a virtual grid covering the whole space (width and height are up to your actual points space) and find all the 2D points which belong to every cell. After that a cell will be a bucket in a hashtable.

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