Statistics of cross sections of Voronoi tessellations

In this paper we investigate relationships between the volumes of cells of three-dimensional Voronoi tessellations and the lengths and areas of sections obtained by intersecting the tessellation with a randomly oriented plane. Here, in order to obtain analytical results, Voronoi cells are approximated to spheres. First, the probability density function for the lengths of the radii of the sections is derived and it is shown that it is related to the Meijer $G$-function; its properties are discussed and comparisons are made with the numerical results. Next the probability density function for the areas of cross sections is computed and compared with the results of numerical simulations.Comment: 10 pages and 6 figure

\v{C}ech-Delaunay gradient flow and homology inference for self-maps

We call a continuous self-map that reveals itself through a discrete set of point-value pairs a sampled dynamical system. Capturing the available information with chain maps on Delaunay complexes, we use persistent homology to quantify the evidence of recurrent behavior. We establish a sampling theorem to recover the eigenspace of the endomorphism on homology induced by the self-map. Using a combinatorial gradient flow arising from the discrete Morse theory for \v{C}ech and Delaunay complexes, we construct a chain map to transform the problem from the natural but expensive \v{C}ech complexes to the computationally efficient Delaunay triangulations. The fast chain map algorithm has applications beyond dynamical systems.Comment: 22 pages, 8 figure

Bregman Voronoi Diagrams: Properties, Algorithms and Applications

The Voronoi diagram of a finite set of objects is a fundamental geometric structure that subdivides the embedding space into regions, each region consisting of the points that are closer to a given object than to the others. We may define many variants of Voronoi diagrams depending on the class of objects, the distance functions and the embedding space. In this paper, we investigate a framework for defining and building Voronoi diagrams for a broad class of distance functions called Bregman divergences. Bregman divergences include not only the traditional (squared) Euclidean distance but also various divergence measures based on entropic functions. Accordingly, Bregman Voronoi diagrams allow to define information-theoretic Voronoi diagrams in statistical parametric spaces based on the relative entropy of distributions. We define several types of Bregman diagrams, establish correspondences between those diagrams (using the Legendre transformation), and show how to compute them efficiently. We also introduce extensions of these diagrams, e.g. k-order and k-bag Bregman Voronoi diagrams, and introduce Bregman triangulations of a set of points and their connexion with Bregman Voronoi diagrams. We show that these triangulations capture many of the properties of the celebrated Delaunay triangulation. Finally, we give some applications of Bregman Voronoi diagrams which are of interest in the context of computational geometry and machine learning.Comment: Extend the proceedings abstract of SODA 2007 (46 pages, 15 figures

Kinetic and Dynamic Delaunay tetrahedralizations in three dimensions

We describe the implementation of algorithms to construct and maintain three-dimensional dynamic Delaunay triangulations with kinetic vertices using a three-simplex data structure. The code is capable of constructing the geometric dual, the Voronoi or Dirichlet tessellation. Initially, a given list of points is triangulated. Time evolution of the triangulation is not only governed by kinetic vertices but also by a changing number of vertices. We use three-dimensional simplex flip algorithms, a stochastic visibility walk algorithm for point location and in addition, we propose a new simple method of deleting vertices from an existing three-dimensional Delaunay triangulation while maintaining the Delaunay property. The dual Dirichlet tessellation can be used to solve differential equations on an irregular grid, to define partitions in cell tissue simulations, for collision detection etc.Comment: 29 pg (preprint), 12 figures, 1 table Title changed (mainly nomenclature), referee suggestions included, typos corrected, bibliography update

Minkowski Tensors of Anisotropic Spatial Structure

This article describes the theoretical foundation of and explicit algorithms for a novel approach to morphology and anisotropy analysis of complex spatial structure using tensor-valued Minkowski functionals, the so-called Minkowski tensors. Minkowski tensors are generalisations of the well-known scalar Minkowski functionals and are explicitly sensitive to anisotropic aspects of morphology, relevant for example for elastic moduli or permeability of microstructured materials. Here we derive explicit linear-time algorithms to compute these tensorial measures for three-dimensional shapes. These apply to representations of any object that can be represented by a triangulation of its bounding surface; their application is illustrated for the polyhedral Voronoi cellular complexes of jammed sphere configurations, and for triangulations of a biopolymer fibre network obtained by confocal microscopy. The article further bridges the substantial notational and conceptual gap between the different but equivalent approaches to scalar or tensorial Minkowski functionals in mathematics and in physics, hence making the mathematical measure theoretic method more readily accessible for future application in the physical sciences

Intersection of paraboloids and application to Minkowski-type problems

In this article, we study the intersection (or union) of the convex hull of N confocal paraboloids (or ellipsoids) of revolution. This study is motivated by a Minkowski-type problem arising in geometric optics. We show that in each of the four cases, the combinatorics is given by the intersection of a power diagram with the unit sphere. We prove the complexity is O(N) for the intersection of paraboloids and Omega(N^2) for the intersection and the union of ellipsoids. We provide an algorithm to compute these intersections using the exact geometric computation paradigm. This algorithm is optimal in the case of the intersection of ellipsoids and is used to solve numerically the far-field reflector problem