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Streaming computation of Delaunay triangulations

Published:01 July 2006Publication History
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We show how to greatly accelerate algorithms that compute Delaunay triangulations of huge, well-distributed point sets in 2D and 3D by exploiting the natural spatial coherence in a stream of points. We achieve large performance gains by introducing spatial finalization into point streams: we partition space into regions, and augment a stream of input points with finalization tags that indicate when a point is the last in its region. By extending an incremental algorithm for Delaunay triangulation to use finalization tags and produce streaming mesh output, we compute a billion-triangle terrain representation for the Neuse River system from 11.2 GB of LIDAR data in 48 minutes using only 70 MB of memory on a laptop with two hard drives. This is a factor of twelve faster than the previous fastest out-of-core Delaunay triangulation software.

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          cover image ACM Transactions on Graphics
          ACM Transactions on Graphics  Volume 25, Issue 3
          July 2006
          742 pages
          ISSN:0730-0301
          EISSN:1557-7368
          DOI:10.1145/1141911
          Issue’s Table of Contents

          Copyright © 2006 ACM

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          • Published: 1 July 2006
          Published in tog Volume 25, Issue 3

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