9,476 research outputs found
The projector algorithm: a simple parallel algorithm for computing Voronoi diagrams and Delaunay graphs
The Voronoi diagram is a certain geometric data structure which has numerous
applications in various scientific and technological fields. The theory of
algorithms for computing 2D Euclidean Voronoi diagrams of point sites is rich
and useful, with several different and important algorithms. However, this
theory has been quite steady during the last few decades in the sense that no
essentially new algorithms have entered the game. In addition, most of the
known algorithms are serial in nature and hence cast inherent difficulties on
the possibility to compute the diagram in parallel. In this paper we present
the projector algorithm: a new and simple algorithm which enables the
(combinatorial) computation of 2D Voronoi diagrams. The algorithm is
significantly different from previous ones and some of the involved concepts in
it are in the spirit of linear programming and optics. Parallel implementation
is naturally supported since each Voronoi cell can be computed independently of
the other cells. A new combinatorial structure for representing the cells (and
any convex polytope) is described along the way and the computation of the
induced Delaunay graph is obtained almost automatically.Comment: This is a major revision; re-organization and better presentation of
some parts; correction of several inaccuracies; improvement of some proofs
and figures; added references; modification of the title; the paper is long
but more than half of it is composed of proofs and references: it is
sufficient to look at pages 5, 7--11 in order to understand the algorith
Light in Power: A General and Parameter-free Algorithm for Caustic Design
We present in this paper a generic and parameter-free algorithm to
efficiently build a wide variety of optical components, such as mirrors or
lenses, that satisfy some light energy constraints. In all of our problems, one
is given a collimated or point light source and a desired illumination after
reflection or refraction and the goal is to design the geometry of a mirror or
lens which transports exactly the light emitted by the source onto the target.
We first propose a general framework and show that eight different optical
component design problems amount to solving a light energy conservation
equation that involves the computation of visibility diagrams. We then show
that these diagrams all have the same structure and can be obtained by
intersecting a 3D Power diagram with a planar or spherical domain. This allows
us to propose an efficient and fully generic algorithm capable to solve these
eight optical component design problems. The support of the prescribed target
illumination can be a set of directions or a set of points located at a finite
distance. Our solutions satisfy design constraints such as convexity or
concavity. We show the effectiveness of our algorithm on simulated and
fabricated examples
Geodesic-Preserving Polygon Simplification
Polygons are a paramount data structure in computational geometry. While the
complexity of many algorithms on simple polygons or polygons with holes depends
on the size of the input polygon, the intrinsic complexity of the problems
these algorithms solve is often related to the reflex vertices of the polygon.
In this paper, we give an easy-to-describe linear-time method to replace an
input polygon by a polygon such that (1)
contains , (2) has its reflex
vertices at the same positions as , and (3) the number of vertices
of is linear in the number of reflex vertices. Since the
solutions of numerous problems on polygons (including shortest paths, geodesic
hulls, separating point sets, and Voronoi diagrams) are equivalent for both
and , our algorithm can be used as a preprocessing
step for several algorithms and makes their running time dependent on the
number of reflex vertices rather than on the size of
Rounding Algorithms for a Geometric Embedding of Minimum Multiway Cut
The multiway-cut problem is, given a weighted graph and k >= 2 terminal
nodes, to find a minimum-weight set of edges whose removal separates all the
terminals. The problem is NP-hard, and even NP-hard to approximate within
1+delta for some small delta > 0.
Calinescu, Karloff, and Rabani (1998) gave an algorithm with performance
guarantee 3/2-1/k, based on a geometric relaxation of the problem. In this
paper, we give improved randomized rounding schemes for their relaxation,
yielding a 12/11-approximation algorithm for k=3 and a 1.3438-approximation
algorithm in general.
Our approach hinges on the observation that the problem of designing a
randomized rounding scheme for a geometric relaxation is itself a linear
programming problem. The paper explores computational solutions to this
problem, and gives a proof that for a general class of geometric relaxations,
there are always randomized rounding schemes that match the integrality gap.Comment: Conference version in ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (1999). To
appear in Mathematics of Operations Researc
Revisiting interval protection, a.k.a. partial cell suppression, for tabular data
The final publication is available at link.springer.comInterval protection or partial cell suppression was introduced in “M. Fischetti, J.-J. Salazar, Partial cell suppression: A new methodology for statistical disclosure control, Statistics and Computing, 13, 13–21, 2003” as a “linearization” of the difficult cell suppression problem. Interval protection replaces some cells by intervals containing the original cell value, unlike in cell suppression where the values are suppressed. Although the resulting optimization problem is still huge—as in cell suppression, it is linear, thus allowing the application of efficient procedures. In this work we present preliminary results with a prototype implementation of Benders decomposition for interval protection. Although the above seminal publication about partial cell suppression applied a similar methodology, our approach differs in two aspects: (i) the boundaries of the intervals are completely independent in our implementation, whereas the one of 2003 solved a simpler variant where boundaries must satisfy a certain ratio; (ii) our prototype is applied to a set of seven general and hierarchical tables, whereas only three two-dimensional tables were solved with the implementation of 2003.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Distance-Sensitive Planar Point Location
Let be a connected planar polygonal subdivision with edges
that we want to preprocess for point-location queries, and where we are given
the probability that the query point lies in a polygon of
. We show how to preprocess such that the query time
for a point~ depends on~ and, in addition, on the distance
from to the boundary of~---the further away from the boundary, the
faster the query. More precisely, we show that a point-location query can be
answered in time , where
is the shortest Euclidean distance of the query point~ to the
boundary of . Our structure uses space and
preprocessing time. It is based on a decomposition of the regions of
into convex quadrilaterals and triangles with the following
property: for any point , the quadrilateral or triangle
containing~ has area . For the special case where
is a subdivision of the unit square and
, we present a simpler solution that achieves a
query time of . The latter solution can be extended to
convex subdivisions in three dimensions
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