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Polygon Triangulation

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Years and Authors of Summarized Original Work

  • 1991; Chazelle

Problem Definition

Definition 1

A simple polygon is a polygon whose interior is simply connected, i.e., it consists of a single connected component and does not contain holes.

Definition 2

A triangulation of a simple polygon P with N vertices is a partition of the polygon, considered as a full-dimensional subset of the plane, into N − 2 nonoverlapping triangles such that the set of vertices of these triangles is the set of vertices of P, such that no edge of a triangle lies outside of P, and such that no triangle edges intersect except in their common endpoints.

Key Results

In addition to the regularization-based approach by Garey et al. [7], three other \(\mathcal{O}(N\log N)\)-time algorithms are milestones on the way toward an optimal linear-time algorithm. In the first of these algorithms [2], Chazelle uses a linear-time “polygon-cutting” approach to partition a simple polygon by a suitably chosen diagonal; the resulting...

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Recommended Reading

  1. Amato NM, Goodrich MT, Ramos EA (2001) A randomized algorithm for triangulating a simple polygon in linear time. Discret Comput Geom 26:245–265

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  2. Chazelle BM (1982) A theorem on polygon cutting with applications. In: Proceedings of the twenty-third annual symposium on foundations of computer science, Chicago. IEEE, pp 339–349

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  3. Chazelle BM (1991) Triangulating a simple polygon in linear time. Discret Comput Geom 6:485–524

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  15. Vahrenhold J (1996) Triangulierung eines einfachen Polygons in linearer Zeit. Master’s thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Münster (in German)

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Correspondence to Jan Vahrenhold .

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© 2016 Springer Science+Business Media New York

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Vahrenhold, J. (2016). Polygon Triangulation. In: Kao, MY. (eds) Encyclopedia of Algorithms. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2864-4_506

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