The computation of determinants or their signs is the core procedure in many
important geometric algorithms, such as convex hull, volume and point location.
As the dimension of the computation space grows, a higher percentage of the
total computation time is consumed by these computations. In this paper we
study the sequences of determinants that appear in geometric algorithms. The
computation of a single determinant is accelerated by using the information
from the previous computations in that sequence.
We propose two dynamic determinant algorithms with quadratic arithmetic
complexity when employed in convex hull and volume computations, and with
linear arithmetic complexity when used in point location problems. We implement
the proposed algorithms and perform an extensive experimental analysis. On one
hand, our analysis serves as a performance study of state-of-the-art
determinant algorithms and implementations. On the other hand, we demonstrate
the supremacy of our methods over state-of-the-art implementations of
determinant and geometric algorithms. Our experimental results include a 20 and
78 times speed-up in volume and point location computations in dimension 6 and
11 respectively.Comment: 29 pages, 8 figures, 3 table