International Journal of Computational Geometry & Applications

Two recent methods have increased hopes of finding a polynomial time solution to the problem of computing the minimum weight triangulation of a set S of n points in the plane. Both involve computing what was believed to be a connected or nearly connected subgraph of the minimum weight triangulation, and then completing the triangulation optimally. The first method uses the light graph of S as its initial subgraph. The second method uses the LMT-skeleton of S. Both methods rely, for their polynomial time bound, on the initial subgraphs having only a constant number of components. Experiments performed by the authors of these methods seemed to confirm that randomly chosen point sets displayed this desired property. We show that there exist point sets where the number of components is linear in n. In fact, the expected number of components in either graph on a randomly chosen point set is linear in n, and the probability of the number of components exceeding some constant times n tends to one.

We propose algorithms to enumerate (1) regular triangulations, (2) spanning regular triangulations, (3) equivalence classes of regular triangulations with respect to symmetry, and (4) all triangulations. All of the algorithms are for arbitrary points in general dimension. They work in output-size sensitive time with memory only of several times the size of a triangulation. For the enumeration of regular triangulations, we use the fact by Gel'fand, Zelevinskii and Kapranov that regular triangulations correspond to the vertices of the secondary polytope. We use reverse search technique by Avis and Fukuda, its extension for enumerating equivalence classes of objects, and a reformulation of a maximal independent set enumeration algorithm. The last approach can be extended for enumeration of dissections.

For a given set of points in the Euclidean plane, a minimum network (a Steiner minimal tree) can be constructed using a geometric method, called Melzak's construction. The core of the Melzak construction is to replace a pair of terminals adjacent to the same Steiner point with a new terminal. In this paper we prove that the Melzak construction can be generalized to constructing Steiner minimal trees for circles so that either the given points (terminals) are constrained on the circles or the terminal edges are tangent to the circles. Then we show that the generalized Melzak construction can be used to find minimum networks separating and surrounding circular objects or to find minimum networks connecting convex and smoothly bounded objects and avoiding convex and smoothly bounded obstacles.

Given a finite set of points in ℝ^d, the diameter of is defined as the maximum distance between two points of . We propose a very simple algorithm to compute the diameter of a finite set of points. Although the algorithm is not worst-case optimal, an extensive experimental study has shown that it is extremely fast for a large variety of point distributions. In addition, we propose a comparison with the recent approach of Har-Peled⁵ and derive hybrid algorithms to combine advantages of both approaches.

We deal with a map-abeling problem, named LOFL (Left-part Ordered Flexible Labeling), to label a set of points in a plane in the presence of polygonal obstacles. The label for each point is selected from a set of rectangles with various shapes satisfying the left-part ordered property, and is placed near to the point after scaled by a scaling factor σ which is common to all points. In this paper, we give an optimal O((n + m) log (n + m)) algorithm to decide the feasibility of LOFL for a fixed scaling factor σ, and an O((n + m) log² (n + m)) time algorithm to find the largest feasible scaling factor σ, where n is the number of points and m is the total number of edges of the polygonal obstacles.