In computational geometry, the problem of computing the intersection of a polyhedron with a line has important applications in computer graphics, optimization, and even in some Monte Carlo methods. It can be viewed as a three-dimensional version of the line clipping problem. [1]
If the polyhedron is given as the intersection of a finite number of halfspaces, then one may partition the halfspaces into three subsets: the ones that include only one infinite end of the line, the ones that include the other end, and the ones that include both ends. The halfspaces that include both ends must be parallel to the given line, and do not contribute to the solution. Each of the other two subsets (if it is non-empty) contributes a single endpoint to the intersection, which may be found by intersecting the line with each of the halfplane boundary planes and choosing the intersection point that is closest to the end of the line contained by the halfspaces in the subset. This method, a variant of the Cyrus–Beck algorithm, takes time linear in the number of face planes of the input polyhedron. Alternatively, by testing the line against each of the polygonal facets of the given polyhedron, it is possible to stop the search early when a facet pierced by the line is found. [1]
If a single polyhedron is to be intersected with many lines, it is possible to preprocess the polyhedron into a hierarchical data structure in such a way that intersections with each query line can be determined in logarithmic time per query. [2]
In geometry, a polyhedron is a three-dimensional shape with flat polygonal faces, straight edges and sharp corners or vertices. The word polyhedron comes from the Classical Greek πολύεδρον, as poly- + -hedron.
In graph theory, a planar graph is a graph that can be embedded in the plane, i.e., it can be drawn on the plane in such a way that its edges intersect only at their endpoints. In other words, it can be drawn in such a way that no edges cross each other. Such a drawing is called a plane graph or planar embedding of the graph. A plane graph can be defined as a planar graph with a mapping from every node to a point on a plane, and from every edge to a plane curve on that plane, such that the extreme points of each curve are the points mapped from its end nodes, and all curves are disjoint except on their extreme points.
In geometry, the convex hull or convex envelope or convex closure of a shape is the smallest convex set that contains it. The convex hull may be defined either as the intersection of all convex sets containing a given subset of a Euclidean space, or equivalently as the set of all convex combinations of points in the subset. For a bounded subset of the plane, the convex hull may be visualized as the shape enclosed by a rubber band stretched around the subset.
In solid geometry, a face is a flat surface that forms part of the boundary of a solid object; a three-dimensional solid bounded exclusively by faces is a polyhedron.
Computational geometry is a branch of computer science devoted to the study of algorithms which can be stated in terms of geometry. Some purely geometrical problems arise out of the study of computational geometric algorithms, and such problems are also considered to be part of computational geometry. While modern computational geometry is a recent development, it is one of the oldest fields of computing with a history stretching back to antiquity.
Ray casting is the methodological basis for 3-D CAD/CAM solid modeling and image rendering. It is essentially the same as ray tracing for computer graphics where virtual light rays are "cast" or "traced" on their path from the focal point of a camera through each pixel in the camera sensor to determine what is visible along the ray in the 3-D scene. The term "Ray Casting" was introduced by Scott Roth while at the General Motors Research Labs from 1978-1980. His paper, "Ray Casting for Modeling Solids", describes modeled solid objects by combining primitive solids, such as blocks and cylinders, using the set operators union (+), intersection (&), and difference (-). The general idea of using these binary operators for solid modeling is largely due to Voelcker and Requicha's geometric modelling group at the University of Rochester. See Solid modeling for a broad overview of solid modeling methods. This figure on the right shows a U-Joint modeled from cylinders and blocks in a binary tree using Roth's ray casting system, circa 1979.
In computational geometry, the point-in-polygon (PIP) problem asks whether a given point in the plane lies inside, outside, or on the boundary of a polygon. It is a special case of point location problems and finds applications in areas that deal with processing geometrical data, such as computer graphics, computer vision, geographical information systems (GIS), motion planning, and CAD.
The point location problem is a fundamental topic of computational geometry. It finds applications in areas that deal with processing geometrical data: computer graphics, geographic information systems (GIS), motion planning, and computer aided design (CAD).
In computer graphics and computational geometry, a bounding volume for a set of objects is a closed volume that completely contains the union of the objects in the set. Bounding volumes are used to improve the efficiency of geometrical operations by using simple volumes to contain more complex objects. Normally, simpler volumes have simpler ways to test for overlap.
A convex polytope is a special case of a polytope, having the additional property that it is also a convex set contained in the -dimensional Euclidean space . Most texts use the term "polytope" for a bounded convex polytope, and the word "polyhedron" for the more general, possibly unbounded object. Others allow polytopes to be unbounded. The terms "bounded/unbounded convex polytope" will be used below whenever the boundedness is critical to the discussed issue. Yet other texts identify a convex polytope with its boundary.
In computer graphics, line clipping is the process of removing lines or portions of lines outside an area of interest. Typically, any line or part there of which is outside of the viewing area is removed.
A bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) is a tree structure on a set of geometric objects. All geometric objects are wrapped in bounding volumes that form the leaf nodes of the tree. These nodes are then grouped as small sets and enclosed within larger bounding volumes. These, in turn, are also grouped and enclosed within other larger bounding volumes in a recursive fashion, eventually resulting in a tree structure with a single bounding volume at the top of the tree. Bounding volume hierarchies are used to support several operations on sets of geometric objects efficiently, such as in collision detection and ray tracing.
In graph theory, a book embedding is a generalization of planar embedding of a graph to embeddings into a book, a collection of half-planes all having the same line as their boundary. Usually, the vertices of the graph are required to lie on this boundary line, called the spine, and the edges are required to stay within a single half-plane. The book thickness of a graph is the smallest possible number of half-planes for any book embedding of the graph. Book thickness is also called pagenumber, stacknumber or fixed outerthickness. Book embeddings have also been used to define several other graph invariants including the pagewidth and book crossing number.
In computer science, fractional cascading is a technique to speed up a sequence of binary searches for the same value in a sequence of related data structures. The first binary search in the sequence takes a logarithmic amount of time, as is standard for binary searches, but successive searches in the sequence are faster. The original version of fractional cascading, introduced in two papers by Chazelle and Guibas in 1986, combined the idea of cascading, originating in range searching data structures of Lueker (1978) and Willard (1978), with the idea of fractional sampling, which originated in Chazelle (1983). Later authors introduced more complex forms of fractional cascading that allow the data structure to be maintained as the data changes by a sequence of discrete insertion and deletion events.
The circle packing theorem describes the possible tangency relations between circles in the plane whose interiors are disjoint. A circle packing is a connected collection of circles whose interiors are disjoint. The intersection graph of a circle packing is the graph having a vertex for each circle, and an edge for every pair of circles that are tangent. If the circle packing is on the plane, or, equivalently, on the sphere, then its intersection graph is called a coin graph; more generally, intersection graphs of interior-disjoint geometric objects are called tangency graphs or contact graphs. Coin graphs are always connected, simple, and planar. The circle packing theorem states that these are the only requirements for a graph to be a coin graph:
Polyhedral combinatorics is a branch of mathematics, within combinatorics and discrete geometry, that studies the problems of counting and describing the faces of convex polyhedra and higher-dimensional convex polytopes.
In polyhedral combinatorics, a branch of mathematics, Steinitz's theorem is a characterization of the undirected graphs formed by the edges and vertices of three-dimensional convex polyhedra: they are exactly the (simple) 3-vertex-connected planar graphs. That is, every convex polyhedron forms a 3-connected planar graph, and every 3-connected planar graph can be represented as the graph of a convex polyhedron. For this reason, the 3-connected planar graphs are also known as polyhedral graphs. Branko Grünbaum has called this theorem "the most important and deepest known result on 3-polytopes."
In geometry, the moment curve is an algebraic curve in d-dimensional Euclidean space given by the set of points with Cartesian coordinates of the form
In computational geometry, a maximum disjoint set (MDS) is a largest set of non-overlapping geometric shapes selected from a given set of candidate shapes.
In the geometry of the Euclidean plane, axiality is a measure of how much axial symmetry a shape has. It is defined as the ratio of areas of the largest axially symmetric subset of the shape to the whole shape. Equivalently it is the largest fraction of the area of the shape that can be covered by a mirror reflection of the shape.