We show that Delaunay triangulations and compressed quadtrees are equivalent
structures. More precisely, we give two algorithms: the first computes a
compressed quadtree for a planar point set, given the Delaunay triangulation;
the second finds the Delaunay triangulation, given a compressed quadtree. Both
algorithms run in deterministic linear time on a pointer machine. Our work
builds on and extends previous results by Krznaric and Levcopolous and Buchin
and Mulzer. Our main tool for the second algorithm is the well-separated pair
decomposition(WSPD), a structure that has been used previously to find
Euclidean minimum spanning trees in higher dimensions (Eppstein). We show that
knowing the WSPD (and a quadtree) suffices to compute a planar Euclidean
minimum spanning tree (EMST) in linear time. With the EMST at hand, we can find
the Delaunay triangulation in linear time.
As a corollary, we obtain deterministic versions of many previous algorithms
related to Delaunay triangulations, such as splitting planar Delaunay
triangulations, preprocessing imprecise points for faster Delaunay computation,
and transdichotomous Delaunay triangulations.Comment: 37 pages, 13 figures, full version of a paper that appeared in SODA
201