Efficient way of calculating minimum distance between point and multiple faces - c

I have multiple faces in 3D space creating cells. All these faces lie within a predefined cube (e.g. of size 100x100x100).
Every face is convex and defined by a set of corner points and a normal vector. Every cell is convex. The cells are result of 3d voronoi tessellation, and I know the initial seed points of the cells.
Now for every integer coordinate I want the smallest distance to any face.
My current solution uses this answer https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/544946/determine-if-projection-of-3d-point-onto-plane-is-within-a-triangle/544947 and calculates for every point for every face for every possible triple of this faces points the projection of the point to the triangle created by the triple, checks if the projection is inside the triangle. If this is the case I return the distance between projection and original point. If not I calculate the distance from the point to every possible line segment defined by two points of a face. Then I choose the smallest distance. I repeat this for every point.
This is quite slow and clumsy. I would much rather calculate all points that lie on (or almost lie on) a face and then with these calculate the smallest distance to all neighbour points and repeat this.
I have found this Get all points within a Triangle but am not sure how to apply it to 3D space.
Are there any techniques or algorithms to do this efficiently?

Since we're working with a Voronoi tessellation, we can simplify the current algorithm. Given a grid point p, it belongs to the cell of some site q. Take the minimum over each neighboring site r of the distance from p to the plane that is the perpendicular bisector of qr. We don't need to worry whether the closest point s on the plane belongs to the face between q and r; if not, the segment ps intersects some other face of the cell, which is necessarily closer.
Actually it doesn't even matter if we loop r over some sites that are not neighbors. So if you don't have access to a point location subroutine, or it's slow, we can use a fast nearest neighbors algorithm. Given the grid point p, we know that q is the closest site. Find the second closest site r and compute the distance d(p, bisector(qr)) as above. Now we can prune the sites that are too far away from q (for every other site s, we have d(p, bisector(qs)) ≥ d(q, s)/2 − d(p, q), so we can prune s unless d(q, s) ≤ 2 (d(p, bisector(qr)) + d(p, q))) and keep going until we have either considered or pruned every other site. To do pruning in the best possible way requires access to the guts of the nearest neighbor algorithm; I know that it slots right into the best-first depth-first search of a kd-tree or a cover tree.

Related

Generating a set of N random convex disjoint 2D polygons with at most V vertices, and two additional points?

I want to create a set of N random convex disjoint polygons on a plane where each polygon must have at most V vertices, where N and V are parameters for my function, and I'd like to obtain a distribution as close as possible to uniform (every possible set being equally probable). Also I need to randomly select two points on the plane that either match with one of the vertices in the scene or are in empty space (not inside a polygon).
I already implemented for other reasons in the same programming language an AABB tree, Separating Axis Theorem-based collision detection between convex polygons and I can generate a random convex polygon with arbitrary amount of vertices inside a circle of given radius. My best bet thus far:
Generate a random polygon using the function I have available.
Query the AABB tree to test for interception with existing polygons.
If the AABB tree query returns empty set I push the generated polygon into it, otherwise I test with SAT against all the other polygons whose AABB overlaps with the generated one's. If SAT returns "no intersection" I push the polygon, otherwise I discard it.
Repeat from 1 until N polygons are generated.
Generate a random number in {0,1}
If the generated number is 1 I pick a random polygon and a random vertex on it as a point
If the generated number is 0 I generate a random position in (x,y) and test if it falls within some polygon (I might create a tiny AABB around it and exploit the AABB tree to reduce the required number of PiP tests). In case it's not inside any polygon I approve it as a valid point, otherwise I repeat from 5.
Repeat from 5 once more to get the second point.
I think the solution would possibly work, but unfortunately there's no way to guarantee that I can generate N such polygons for very large N, or find two good points in an acceptable time, and I'm programming in React, where long operations run on the main thread blocking the UI till they end. I could circumvent the issue by ejecting from create-react-app and learn Web Workers, which would require probably more time than it's worth for me.
This is definitely non-uniform distribution, but perhaps you could begin by generating N points in the plane and then computing the Voronoi diagram for those points. The Voronoi diagram can be computed in O(n log n) time with Fortune's algorithm. The cells of the Voronoi diagram are convex, so you can then construct a random polygon of the desired number of vertices that lies within each cell of the diagram.
By Balu Ertl - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link
Ok, here is another proposal. I have little knowledge of js, but could cook up something in Python.
Use Poisson disk sampling with distance parameter d to generate N samples of the centers
For a given center make a circle with R≤d.
Generate V angles using Dirichlet distribution such that sum of angles is equal to 2π. Sort them.
Place vertices on the circle using angles generate at step#3 and connect them. This would be be your polygon
UPDATE
Instead using Poisson disk sampling for step 1, one could use Sobol quasi-random sequences. For N points sampled in the 1x1 box (well, you have to scale it afterwards), least distance between points would be
d = 0.5 * sqrt(D) / N,
where D is dimension of the problem, 2 in your case. So radius of the circle for step 2 would be 0.25 * sqrt(2) / N. This ties nicely N and d.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378475406002382

Closest pair of points algorithm variation

I know this may be a duplicate, but it seems like a variation on the 'Closest pair of Points' algorithm.
Given a Set of N points (x, y) in the unit square and a distance d, find all pair of points such that the distance between them is at most d.
For large N the brute force method is not an option. Besides the 'sweep line' and 'divide and conquer' methods, is there a simpler solution? These pair of points are the edges of an undirected graph, that i need to traverse it and say if it's connected or not (which i already did using DFS, but when N = 1 million it never finishes!).
Any pseudocode, comments or ideas are welcome,
Thanks!
EDIT: I found this on Sedgewick book (i'm looking at the code right now):
Program 3.18 uses a two-dimensional array of linked lists to improve the running time of Program 3.7 by a factor of about 1/d2 when N is sufficiently large. It divides the unit
square up into a grid of equal-sized smaller squares. Then, for each square, it builds a linked list of all the
points that fall into that square. The two-dimensional array provides the capability to access immediately
the set of points close to a given point; the linked lists provide the flexibility to store the points where
they may fall without our having to know ahead of time how many points fall into each grid square.
We are really looking for points that are inside of a circle of center (x,y) and radius d.
The square that encloses circle is a square of center (x,y) and sides 2d. Any point out of this square does not need to be checked, it's out. So, a point a (xa, ya) is out if abs(xa - x) > d or abs (ya -yb) > d.
Same for the square that is enclosed by that circle is a square of center (x,y) and diagonals 2d. Any point out of this square does not need to be checked, it's in. So, a point a (xa, ya) is in if abs(xa - x) < (d * 1.412) or abs(ya -yb) < (d * 1.412).
Those two easy rules combined reduce a lot the number of points to be checked. If we sort the point by their x, filter the possible points, sort by their y, we come to the ones we really need to calculate the full distance.
For any given point, you can use a Manhattan distance (x-delta plus y-delta) heuristic to filter out most of the points that are not within the distance "d" - filter out any points whose Manhattan distance is greater than (sqrt(2) * d), then run the expensive-and-precise distance test on the remaining points.

Fastest way to find minimum distance of one point to points on a curve

I'm looking for a fast solution for the following problem:
I have a fixed point (let's say the upper right on the white measurement line) and need to find the closest point on a curve made of equally spaced points (the lower curve). Additionally, I do this for every point on the upper curve to draw the distances between the curves with different colours (three levels: below minimum [red], between minimum and maximum [orange] and above maximum [green]).
My current solution is a tradeoff: I take the fixed point, iterate through an arbitrary interval (e. g. 50 units to the left and right of the fixed point) and calculate the distance of each pair. This saves some CPU power, but it is neither elegant nor accurate, since I could miss a minimum distance outside my chosen interval.
Any proposals for a faster algorithm?
Edit: Equally spaced means all points have the same distance on the x-axis, this is true for both curves. Also I do not need to interpolate between the points, this would be too time consuming.
Rather than an arbitrary distance, you could perhaps iterate until "out of range".
In your example, suppose you start with the point on the upper curve at the top-right of your line. Then drop vertically downwards, you get a distance of (by my eye) about 200um.
Now you can move right from here testing points until the horizontal distance is 200um. Beyond that, it's impossible to get a distance less than 200um.
Moving left, the distance goes down until you find the 150um minimum, then starts rising again. Once you're 150um to the left of your upper point, again, it's impossible to beat the minimum you've found.
If you'd gone left first, you wouldn't have had to go so far right, so as an optimization either follow the direction in which the distance falls, or else work out from the middle in both directions at once.
I don't know how many um 50 units is, so this might be slower or faster than what you have. It does avoid the risk of missing a lower value, though.
Since you're doing lots of tests against the same set of points on the lower curve, you can proably improve on this by ignoring the fact that the points form a curve at all. Stick them all in a k-d tree or similar, and search that repeatedly. It's called a Nearest neighbor search.
It may help to identify this problem as a nearest neighbour search problem. That link includes a good discussion about the various algorithms that are used for this. If you are OK with using C++ rather than straight C, ANN looks like a good library for this.
It also looks as though this question has been asked before.
We can label the top curve y=t(x) and the bottom curve y=b(x). Label the closest-function x_b=c(x_t). We know that the closest-function is weakly monotone non-decreasing as two shortest paths never cross each other.
If you know that the distance function d(x_t,x_b) has only one local minimum for every fixed x_t (this happens if the curve is "smooth enough"), then you can save time by "walking" the curve:
- start with x_t=0, x_b=0
- while x_t <= x_max
-- find the closest x_b by local search
(increment x_b while the distance is decreasing)
-- add {x_t, x_b} to the result set
-- increment x_t
If you expect x_b to be smooth enough, but you cannot assume that and you want an exact result,
Walk the curve in both directions. Where the results agree, they are correct. Where they disagree, run a complete search betwen the two results (the leftmost and the rightmost local maxima). Sample the "ambiguous block" in such an order (binary division) to allow the most pruning due to the monotonicity.
As a middle ground:
Walk the curve in both directions. If the results disagree, choose among the two. If you can guarantee at most two local maxima for each fixed x_t, this produces the optimal solution. There are still some pathological cases where the optimal solution is not found, and contain a local minimum that is flanked by two other local minima that are both worse than this one. I dare say it is uncommon to find a case where the solution is far from optimal (assuming smooth y=b(x)).

Given centers, find minimum radius for set of circles such that they fully cover another

I have the following geometry problem:
You are given a circle with the center in origin - C(0, 0), and radius 1. Inside the circle are given N points which represent the centers of N different circles. You are asked to find the minimum radius of the small circles (the radius of all the circles are equal) in order to cover all the boundary of the large circle.
The number of circles is: 3 ≤ N ≤ 10000 and the problem has to be solved with a precision of P decimals where 1 ≤ P ≤ 6.
For example:
N = 3 and P = 4
and the coordinates:
(0.193, 0.722)
(-0.158, -0.438)
(-0.068, 0.00)
The radius of the small circles is: 1.0686.
I have the following idea but my problem is implementing it. The idea consists of a binary search to find the radius and for each value given by the binary search to try and find all the intersection point between the small circles and the large one. Each intersection will have as result an arc. The next step is to 'project' the coordinates of the arcs on to the X axis and Y axis, the result being a number of intervals. If the reunions of the intervals from the X and the Y axis have as result the interval [-1, 1] on each axis, it means that all the circle is covered.
In order to avoid precision problems I thought of searching between 0 and 2×10P, and also taking the radius as 10P, thus eliminating the figures after the comma, but my problem is figuring out how to simulate the intersection of the circles and afterwards how to see if the reunion of the resulting intervals form the interval [-1, 1].
Any suggestions are welcomed!
Each point in your set has to cover the the intersection of its cell in the point-set's voronoi diagram and the test-circle around the origin.
To find the radius, start by computing the voronoi diagram of your point set. Now "close" this voronoi diagram by intersecting all infinite edges with your target-circle. Then for each point in your set, check the distance to all the points of its "closed" voronoi cell. The maximum should be your solution.
It shouldn't matter that the cells get closed by an arc instead of a straight line by the test-circle until your solution radius gets greater than 1 (because then the "small" circles will arc stronger). In that case, you also have to check the furthest point from the cell center to that arc.
I might be missing something, but it seems that you only need to find the maximal minimal distance between a point in the circle and the given points.
That is, if you consider the set of all points on the circle, and take the minimal distance between each point to one of the given points, and then take the maximal values of all these - you have found your radius.
This is, of course, not an algorithm, as there are uncountably many points.
I think what I'll do would be along the line of:
Find the minimal distance between the circumference and the set of points, this is your initial radius R.
Check if the entire circle was covered, like so:
For any two points whose distance from each other is more than 2R, check if the entire segment was covered (for each point, check if the circle around it intersects, and if so, remove that segment and keep going). That should take about o(N^3) (you iterate over all of the points for each pair of points). If I'm correct (though I didn't formally prove it) the circle is covered iff all of the segments are covered.
Of all the segment which weren't covered, take the long one, and add half it's length to R.
Repeat.
This algorithm will never cover the circle per se, but it's easy to prove that it exponentially converges to a full cover, so it should be able to find the needed radius with arbitrary accuracy within a reasonable amount of iterations.
Hope that helps.

Given a set of points, how do I find the two points that are farthest from each other? [duplicate]

This question already has answers here:
Closed 10 years ago.
Possible Duplicate:
Greatest linear dimension 2d set of points
I could compute the distance between each point and take the largest but that doesn't sound like a very efficient way to do it when there are a large (> 1000) number of points.
Note: This is for iPhone so I don't have a ton of processing power.
Why not just compute the convex hull of the points? Depending on the algorithm you use, it takes either O(n) or O(n log n) time and eliminates all the inner points from consideration. Then, only check these outermost points to find the two that are the farthest away.
You're asking to compute the diameter of the set. The standard technique is to first compute the convex hull, which reduces the problem to finding the diameter of a convex polygon. Even in the case where you don't eliminate any points, this added information is exactly what's needed to solve the problem efficiently. However, finding the diameter of a convex polygon is not entirely trivial; several published papers with algorithms for this task turn out to be incorrect.
Here's a fairly readable discussion of a correct O(n) algorithm for the task (where n is the number of points in the convex hull).
Also, note the the iphone isn't that limited; a carefully written implementation of even the completely naive algorithm can handle 1000 points in less than a tenth of a second. Of course, using the correct algorithm will let you go much faster =)
Start with point with lowest x-coord. (Call it Point X)
Construct set of "boundary points"
starting with point x, and vertical line through the point, There should be no other points to left of PointX) find the next point in boundary by slowly rotating the line clockwise (Or counterclockwise) until the line touches some other point, (see below). Add that point to the set and repeat with that next point to get the next one, until you eventually get back to the original point x. You npw have a set of points forming the boundary of the complete set. Compare distance between each pair in this reduced set to find the pair that are furthest apart.
To "rotate the line" (to find each sequential boundary point), take the point which is "furthest" in the direction perpindicular to the line used for the last boundary point, and construct a new line between the last boundary point and that "next" point. Then verify that there are no other points furthur in the new perpindicular direction formed by that new line. If there are no other points "furthur out" in the dirtection perpindicular to this line or to the last line, then this is the right cjhoice for the next boundary point, if there is such a point, switch to that one and retest.
See these pages (the one linked to and the pages reachable by clicking on the "next" links) on computing the diameter of the convex hull of a set of points.
My quick summary:
compute set of points in convex hull (= O(n log n), the only time you get O(n) is if you sort the list first which takes O(n log n) anyway)
order along boundary (you get this for free if you use a Graham scan for #1)
use one of the O(n) diameter algorithms to scan for antipodal points with greatest diameter. Shamos algorithm looks good to me as it's one of the rotating calipers algorithms.

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