The limit of $L_p$ Voronoi diagrams as $p \rightarrow 0$ is the bounding-box-area Voronoi diagram

Abstract

We consider the Voronoi diagram of points in the real plane when the distance between two points $a$ and $b$ is given by $L_p(a-b)$ where $L_p((x,y)) = (|x|^p+|y|^p)^{1/p}.$ We prove that the Voronoi diagram has a limit as $p$ converges to zero from above or from below: it is the diagram that corresponds to the distance function $L_*((x,y)) = |xy|$. In this diagram, the bisector of two points in general position consists of a line and two branches of a hyperbola that split the plane into three faces per point. We propose to name $L_*$ as defined above the "geometric $L_0$ distance".Comment: 15 pages, 13 figure