We use my dynamic closest pair data structure from "Dynamic Euclidean minimum spanning trees" to detect collisions among a collection of moving objects in sublinear time per collision. As one application, we can construct the straight skeleton of Aichholzer et al (and the mitered offset curves from which it is defined) in subquadratic time.
(Jeff's publications page and copy of the journal version)
We use a construction inspired by the motorcycle graphs previously used in straight skeleton construction, to partition quadrilateral meshes into a small number of structured submeshes. Our construction is canonical in that two copies of the same mesh will always be partitioned in the same way, and can be used to speed up graph isomorphism computations for geometric models in feature animation.
A straight skeleton is defined by the locus of points crossed by the edges and vertices of a polyhedron as it undergoes a continuous shrinking process in which the faces move inwards at constant speed. We resolve some ambiguities in the definition of these shapes, define efficient algorithms for polyhedra with axis-parallel faces, show that arbitrary polyhedra have strictly more complicated straight skeletons, and report on results from an implementation of our algorithm for arbitrary polyhedra.
Geometry – Publications – David Eppstein – Theory Group – Inf. & Comp. Sci. – UC Irvine
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