Vesicle computers: Approximating Voronoi diagram on Voronoi automata

Irregular arrangements of vesicles filled with excitable and precipitating chemical systems are imitated by Voronoi automata --- finite-state machines defined on a planar Voronoi diagram. Every Voronoi cell takes four states: resting, excited, refractory and precipitate. A resting cell excites if it has at least one excited neighbour; the cell precipitates if a ratio of excited cells in its neighbourhood to its number of neighbours exceed certain threshold. To approximate a Voronoi diagram on Voronoi automata we project a planar set onto automaton lattice, thus cells corresponding to data-points are excited. Excitation waves propagate across the Voronoi automaton, interact with each other and form precipitate in result of the interaction. Configuration of precipitate represents edges of approximated Voronoi diagram. We discover relation between quality of Voronoi diagram approximation and precipitation threshold, and demonstrate feasibility of our model in approximation Voronoi diagram of arbitrary-shaped objects and a skeleton of a planar shape.Comment: Chaos, Solitons & Fractals (2011), in pres

Higher-order Voronoi diagrams of polygonal objects

Higher-order Voronoi diagrams are fundamental geometric structures which encode the k-nearest neighbor information. Thus, they aid in computations that require proximity information beyond the nearest neighbor. They are related to various favorite structures in computational geometry and are a fascinating combinatorial problem to study. While higher-order Voronoi diagrams of points have been studied a lot, they have not been considered for other types of sites. Points lack dimensionality which makes them unable to represent various real-life instances. Points are the simplest kind of geometric object and therefore higher- order Voronoi diagrams of points can be considered as the corner case of all higher-order Voronoi diagrams. The goal of this dissertation is to move away from the corner and bring the higher-order Voronoi diagram to more general geometric instances. We focus on certain polygonal objects as they provide flexibility and are able to represent real-life instances. Before this dissertation, higher-order Voronoi diagrams of polygonal objects had been studied only for the nearest neighbor and farthest Voronoi diagrams. In this dissertation we investigate structural and combinatorial properties and discover that the dimensionality of geometric objects manifests itself in numerous ways which do not exist in the case of points. We prove that the structural complexity of the order-k Voronoi diagram of non-crossing line segments is O(k(n-k)), as in the case of points. We study disjoint line segments, intersecting line segments, line segments forming a planar straight-line graph and extend the results to the Lp metric, 1<=p<=infty. We also establish the connection between two mathematical abstractions: abstract Voronoi diagrams and the Clarkson-Shor framework. We design several construction algorithms that cover the case of non-point sites. While computational geometry provides several approaches to study the structural complexity that give tight realizable bounds, developing an effective construction algorithm is still a challenging problem even for points. Most of the construction algorithms are designed to work with points as they utilize their simplicity and relations with data-structures that work specifically for points. We extend the iterative and the sweepline approaches that are quite efficient in constructing all order-i Voronoi diagrams, for i<=k and we also give three randomized construction algorithms for abstract higher-order Voronoi diagrams that deal specifically with the construction of the order-k Voronoi diagrams

A Sweepline Algorithm for Generalized Delaunay Triangulations

We give a deterministic O(n log n) sweepline algorithm to construct the generalized Voronoi diagram for n points in the plane or rather its dual the generalized Delaunay triangulation. The algorithm uses no transformations and it is developed solely from the sweepline paradigm together with greediness. A generalized Delaunay triangulation can be based on an arbitrary strictly convex Minkowski distance function (including all L_p distance functions 1 &lt; p &lt; *) in contrast to ordinary Delaunay triangualations which are based on the Euclidean distance function

Real-Time Cave Destruction Using 3D Voronoi

Arvutimängudes kasutatakse keskkonna muutmiseks enamasti lihtsaid meetodeid, nagu maailma kujutamist vokslitena, või eelkalkuleeritud hävitamist. Käesolevas töös uuritakse, kuidas muuta seda reaalsemaks, kasutades Voronoi diagramme. Selles lähenemises kujutatakse kogu maailma ühe 3D Voronoi diagrammina, millesse lisatud koopad on saadud Voronoi rakkude eemaldamise teel. Töö eesmärgiks on leida sobivad algoritmid sellise koopa genereerimiseks, võrrelda nende sobivust ja luua prototüüprakendus Unity mängumootoris, millega testida, kas selline lähenemine on mõistlik. Selles simulatsioonis saab kasutaja mõjutada koobast, lõigates sealt tükke välja ning seeläbi suurendades Voronoi diagrammi reaalajas. Töös uuritakse ka erinevaid lähenemisi juba olemasolevast geomeetriast tükkide välja lõikamiseks ja vaadeldakse erinevaid algoritme geomeetria manipuleerimiseks.Environment modification in video games are often done by using simple methods like voxels or pre-calculated destruction. The aim of this thesis is to study different ways of making it more realistic by generating the environment destruction in real time using Voronoi diagrams. This approach represents the world as a 3D Voronoi diagram where the cave is represented as a region where some of the Voronoi cells have been removed. The goal of this thesis is to find the suitable algorithms for such cave generation, compare them and implement a proof of concept simulation in Unity game engine. In this simulation the user can modify the cave by cutting out more pieces, thus expanding the Voronoi diagram in real-time. To cut off pieces of already fixed geometry different approaches for geometry manipulation are also compared

Exact Generalized Voronoi Diagram Computation using a Sweepline Algorithm

Voronoi Diagrams can provide useful spatial information. Little work has been done on computing exact Voronoi Diagrams when the sites are more complex than a point. We introduce a technique that measures the exact Generalized Voronoi Diagram from points, line segments and, connected lines including lines that connect to form simple polygons. Our technique is an extension of Fortune’s method. Our approach treats connected lines (or polygons) as a single site

Acceleration of Computational Geometry Algorithms for High Performance Computing Based Geo-Spatial Big Data Analysis

Geo-Spatial computing and data analysis is the branch of computer science that deals with real world location-based data. Computational geometry algorithms are algorithms that process geometry/shapes and is one of the pillars of geo-spatial computing. Real world map and location-based data can be huge in size and the data structures used to process them extremely big leading to huge computational costs. Furthermore, Geo-Spatial datasets are growing on all V’s (Volume, Variety, Value, etc.) and are becoming larger and more complex to process in-turn demanding more computational resources. High Performance Computing is a way to breakdown the problem in ways that it can run in parallel on big computers with massive processing power and hence reduce the computing time delivering the same results but much faster.This dissertation explores different techniques to accelerate the processing of computational geometry algorithms and geo-spatial computing like using Many-core Graphics Processing Units (GPU), Multi-core Central Processing Units (CPU), Multi-node setup with Message Passing Interface (MPI), Cache optimizations, Memory and Communication optimizations, load balancing, Algorithmic Modifications, Directive based parallelization with OpenMP or OpenACC and Vectorization with compiler intrinsic (AVX). This dissertation has applied at least one of the mentioned techniques to the following problems. Novel method to parallelize plane sweep based geometric intersection for GPU with directives is presented. Parallelization of plane sweep based Voronoi construction, parallelization of Segment tree construction, Segment tree queries and Segment tree-based operations has been presented. Spatial autocorrelation, computation of getis-ord hotspots are also presented. Acceleration performance and speedup results are presented in each corresponding chapter

Witness (Delaunay) Graphs

Proximity graphs are used in several areas in which a neighborliness relationship for input data sets is a useful tool in their analysis, and have also received substantial attention from the graph drawing community, as they are a natural way of implicitly representing graphs. However, as a tool for graph representation, proximity graphs have some limitations that may be overcome with suitable generalizations. We introduce a generalization, witness graphs, that encompasses both the goal of more power and flexibility for graph drawing issues and a wider spectrum for neighborhood analysis. We study in detail two concrete examples, both related to Delaunay graphs, and consider as well some problems on stabbing geometric objects and point set discrimination, that can be naturally described in terms of witness graphs.Comment: 27 pages. JCCGG 200

Efficient Yao Graph Construction

Yao graphs are geometric spanners that connect each point of a given point set to its nearest neighbor in each of k cones drawn around it. Yao graphs were introduced to construct minimum spanning trees in d dimensional spaces. Moreover, they are used for instance in topology control in wireless networks. An optimal ?(n log n)-time algorithm to construct Yao graphs for a given point set has been proposed in the literature but - to the best of our knowledge - never been implemented. Instead, algorithms with a quadratic complexity are used in popular packages to construct these graphs. In this paper we present the first implementation of the optimal Yao graph algorithm. We engineer the data structures required to achieve the ?(n log n) time bound and detail algorithmic adaptations necessary to take the original algorithm from theory to practice. We propose a priority queue data structure that separates static and dynamic events and might be of independent interest for other sweepline algorithms. Additionally, we propose a new Yao graph algorithm based on a uniform grid data structure that performs well for medium-sized inputs. We evaluate our implementations on a wide variety of synthetic and real-world datasets and show that our implementation outperforms current publicly available implementations by at least an order of magnitude

Algorithms for Triangles, Cones & Peaks

Three different geometric objects are at the center of this dissertation: triangles, cones and peaks. In computational geometry, triangles are the most basic shape for planar subdivisions. Particularly, Delaunay triangulations are a widely used for manifold applications in engineering, geographic information systems, telecommunication networks, etc. We present two novel parallel algorithms to construct the Delaunay triangulation of a given point set. Yao graphs are geometric spanners that connect each point of a given set to its nearest neighbor in each of $k$ cones drawn around it. They are used to aid the construction of Euclidean minimum spanning trees or in wireless networks for topology control and routing. We present the first implementation of an optimal $\mathcal{O}(n \log n)$-time sweepline algorithm to construct Yao graphs. One metric to quantify the importance of a mountain peak is its isolation. Isolation measures the distance between a peak and the closest point of higher elevation. Computing this metric from high-resolution digital elevation models (DEMs) requires efficient algorithms. We present a novel sweep-plane algorithm that can calculate the isolation of all peaks on Earth in mere minutes