I have a straight line which intersects a convex polygon in 2D plane. There exists a circle with constant radius. The center of circle is moving on this line. So at first the polygon and circle don't intersect with each other, as the circle gets closer to the polygon the intersection increases and then decreases as they go further from each other. I want to prove the area of the intersection of the convex polygon and circle doesn't have local minima(as the circle moves on the line).
Interesting problem. Please post solution once you find it. My approach would be to take a similar route to Fortunes algorithm to build a Voronoi graph - meaning I would consider "events" that are happening when the circle traverses a convex polygon.
Basically to better understand the problem, consider the restriction that the circle is traveling on straight line - why is that important - look at counter examples. Then look when will this fail if poly is not convex?
The events that I would consider would be an entry/exit of a poly vertex into circle, and entry exit of an poly edge from/into the circle. Then keep track of area increasing or decreasing through each event, and show that it is necessarily monotonic.
Related
I am trying to implement a decal mesh generator as described here: http://blog.wolfire.com/2009/06/how-to-project-decals/. The blog suggests an algorithm for triangulation of the intersection polygon between a triangle and square:
First, we can start with one border at a time. Let's pick the left
border. To crop the triangle, we start by marking every vertex in
violation of the rule -- in this case, the leftmost one. Then we look
at every line between a marked vertex and an unmarked vertex, and add
a vertex at the point at which it crosses the border.
We can then simply remove the marked vertex (or vertices), and move
onto the next border.
Once we've checked all the borders, we have a cropped triangle!
I attempted this algorithm on paper and it doesn't seem like its covering all cases. It seems that its description is missing some critical detail that I have missed. Could someone post a pseudo code implementation?
EDIT: To be more specific, the part that I am unclear on is how the algorithm is able to determine the right "cut" between (black line)
and
When there are multiple choices.
Secondly why does the algorithm not make a cut between the top point of polygon and the bottom left point in picture 2? The algorithm states that "we look
at every line between a marked vertex and an unmarked vertex, and add
a vertex at the point at which it crosses the border", isnt the bottom left point an unmarked vertex?
A reliable way to derive the algorithm is to consider the problem of intersecting a triangle and a half-plane.
First determine if the vertices are in or out of the half plane. This leads to 8 configurations: one such that the whole triangle is discarded, one such that it is left unchanged, three such that it is cropped to a quadrilateral and three such that it is cropped to another triangle.
In the case of a quadrilateral, you split it in two via a diagonal.
After this step, you have 0, 1 or 2 triangles remaining, and you just repeat the operation with the next clipping half-plane on each of them. Bulletproof.
If the triangles are large and are often clipped on several sides (which I doubt), you can consider intersecting with two half-planes forming a stripe at a time. There are 27 cases and the output is made of from 0 to 3 sub-triangles. This can save a few comparisons and intersection computations.
Direct clipping by a rectangle seems complicated.
I have two objects: A sphere and an object. Its an object that I created using surface reconstruction - so we do not know the equation of the object. I want to know the intersecting points on the sphere when the object and the sphere intersect. If we had a sphere and a cylinder, we could solve for the equation and figure out the area and all that but the problem here is that the object is not uniform.
Is there a way to find out the intersecting points or area on the sphere?
I'd start by finding the intersection of triangles with the sphere. First find the intersection of each triangle's plane and the sphere, which gives a circle. Then find the circle's intersection/s with the triangle edges in 2D using line/circle tests. The result will be many arcs which I guess you could approximate with lines. I'm not really sure where to go from here without knowing the end goal.
If it's surface area you're after, maybe a numerical approach would be better. I'd cover the sphere in points and count the number inside the non-uniform object. To find if a point is inside, maybe trace outwards and count the intersections with the surface (if it's odd, the point is inside). You could use the stencil buffer for this if you wanted (similar to stencil shadows).
If you want the volume of intersection a quick google search gives "carve", a mesh based CSG library.
Starting with triangles versus the sphere will give you the points of intersection.
You can take the arcs of intersection with each surface and combine them to make fences around the sphere. Ideally your reconstructed object will be in winged-edge format so you could just step from one fence segment to the next, but with reconstructed surfaces I guess you might need to apply some slightly fuzzy logic.
You can determine which side of each fence is inside the reconstructed object and which side is out by factoring in the surface normals along the fence.
You can then cut the sphere along the fences and add the internal bits to the display.
For the other side of things you could remove any triangle completely inside the sphere and cut those that intersect.
Standard convex hull algorithms will not work with (longitude, latitude)-points, because standard algorithms assume you want the hull of a set of Cartesian points. Latitude-longitude points are not Cartesian, because longitude "wraps around" at the anti-meridian (+/- 180 degrees). I.e., two degrees east of longitude 179 is -179.
So if your set of points happens to straddle the anti-meridian, you will compute spurious hulls that stretch all the way around the world incorrectly.
Any suggestions for tricks I could apply with a standard convex hull algorithm to correct for this, or pointers to proper "geospherical" hull algorithms?
Now that I think on it, there are more interesting cases to consider than straddling the anti-merdian. Consider a "band" of points that encircle the earth -- its convex hull would have no east/west bounds. Or even further, what is the convex hull of {(0,0), (0, 90), (0, -90), (90, 0), (-90, 0), (180, 0)}? -- it would seem to contain the entire surface of the earth, so which points are on its perimeter?
Standard convex hull algorithms are not defeated by the wrapping-around of the coordinates on the surface of the Earth but by a more fundamental problem. The surface of a sphere (let's forget the not-quite-sphericity of the Earth) is not a Euclidean space so Euclidean geometry doesn't work, and convex hull routines which assume that the underlying space is Euclidean (show me one which doesn't, please) won't work.
The surface of the sphere conforms to the concepts of an elliptic geometry where lines are great circles and antipodal points are considered the same point. You've already started to experience the issues arising from trying to apply a Euclidean concept of convexity to an elliptic space.
One approach open to you would be to adopt the definitions of geodesic convexity and implement a geodesic convex hull routine. That looks quite hairy. And it may not produce results which conform to your (generally Euclidean) expectations. In many cases, for 3 arbitrary points, the convex hull turns out to be the entire surface of the sphere.
Another approach, one adopted by navigators and cartographers through the ages, would be to project part of the surface of the sphere (a part containing all your points) into Euclidean space (which is the subject of map projections and I won't bother you with references to the extensive literature thereon) and to figure out the convex hull of the projected points. Project the area you are interested in onto the plane and adjust the coordinates so that they do not wrap around; for example, if you were interested in France you might adjust all longitudes by adding 30deg so that the whole country was coordinated by +ve numbers.
While I'm writing, the idea proposed in #Li-aung Yip's answer, of using a 3D convex hull algorithm, strikes me as misguided. The 3D convex hull of the set of surface points will include points, edges and faces which lie inside the sphere. These literally do not exist on the 2D surface of the sphere and only change your difficulties from wrestling with the not-quite-right concept in 2D to quite-wrong in 3D. Further, I learned from the Wikipedia article I referenced that a closed hemisphere (ie one which includes its 'equator') is not convex in the geometry of the surface of the sphere.
Instead of considering your data as latitude-longitude data, could you instead consider it in 3D space and apply a 3D convex hull algorithm? You may be able to then find the 2D convex hull you desire by analysing the 3D convex hull.
This returns you to well-travelled algorithms for cartesian convex hulls (albeit in three dimensions) and has no issues with wrap around of the coordinates.
Alternately, there's this paper: Computing the Convex Hull of a Simple Polygon on the Sphere (1996) which seems to deal with some of the same issues that you're dealing with (coordinate wrap-around, etc.)
If all your points are within a hemisphere (that is, if you can find a cut plane through the center of the Earth that puts them all on one side), then you can do a central a.k.a. gnomic a.k.a. gnomonic projection from the center of the Earth to a plane parallel to the cut plane. Then all great circles become straight lines in the projection, and so a convex hull in the projection will map back to a correct convex hull on the Earth. You can see how wrong lat/lon points are by looking at the latitude lines in the "Gnomonic Projection" section here (notice that the longitude lines remain straight).
(Treating the Earth as a sphere still isn't quite right, but it's a good second approximation. I don't think points on a true least-distance path across a more realistic Earth (say WGS84) generally lie on a plane through the center. Maybe pretending they do gives you a better approximation than what you get with a sphere.)
FutureNerd:
You are absolutely correct. I had to solve the exact same problem as Maxy-B for my application. As a first iteration, I just treated (lng,lat) as (x,y) and ran a standard 2D algorithm. This worked fine as long as nobody looked too close, because all my data were in the contiguous U.S. As a second iteration, though, I used your approach and proved the concept.
The points MUST be in the same hemisphere. As it turns out, choosing this hemisphere is non-trivial (it's not just the points' center, as I had initially guessed.) To illustrate, consider the following four points: (0,0), (-60,0), (+60,0) along the equator, and (0,90) the north pole. However you choose to define "center", their center lies on the north pole by symmetry and all four points are in the Northern Hemisphere. However, consider replacing the fourth point with, say (-19, 64) iceland. Now their center is NOT on the north pole, but asymmetrically drawn toward iceland. However, all four points are still in the Northern Hemisphere. Further, the Northern Hemisphere, as uniquely defined by the North Pole, is the ONLY hemisphere they share. So calculating this "pole" becomes algorithmic, not algebraic.
See my repository for the Python code:
https://github.com/VictorDavis/GeoConvexHull
This question has been answered a while ago, but I would like to sum up the results of my research.
The spherical convex hull is basically defined only for non-antipodal points. Supposing all the points are on the same hemisphere, you can compute their convex hull in two main ways:
Project the points to a plane using gnomonic/central projection and apply a planar convex hull algorithm. See Lin-Lin Chen, T. C. Woo, "Computational Geometry on the Sphere With Application to Automated Machining" (1992). If the points are on a known hemisphere, you can hard-code on which plane to project the points unto.
Adapt planar convex hull algorithms to the sphere. See C. Grima and A. Marquez, "Computational Geometry on Surfaces: Performing Computational Geometry on the Cylinder, the Sphere, the Torus, and the Cone", Springer (2002). This reference seems to give a similar method to the abstract referenced by Li-aung Yip above.
For reference, in Python I am working on an implementation of my own, which currently works only for points on the Northern hemisphere.
See also this question on Math Overflow.
All edges of a spherical convex hull can be viewed/treated as great circles (seminally, all edges of a convex hull in euclidean space can be treated as lines (rather than a line segment)). Each one of these great circles cuts the sphere into two hemispheres. You could thus conceive each great circle as a constraint. A point that is within the convex hull will be on each of the hemispheres defined by each constraint.
Each edge of the original polygon is a candidate edge of the convex hull. To verify if it is indeed an edge of the convex hull, you'd simply need to verify if all nodes of the polygon are on the hemisphere defined by the great circle that goes through the two nodes of the edge in question. However, we'd still need to create new edges that surpass the concave nodes of the polygon.
But lets rather shortcut / brute-forces this:
Draw a great circle between every pair of nodes in the polygon. Do this in both directions (i.e. the great circle connecting A to B and the great circle connecting B to A). For a polygon with N nodes, you will thus end up with N^2 great circle. Each one of these great circles is a candidate constraint (i.e. a candidate edge of the convex polygon). Some of these great circles will overlap with the edges of the original polygon, but most won't. Now, remember again: each great circle is a constraint that constrains the sphere to one hemisphere. Now verify if all nodes of the original polygon satisfy the constraint (i.e. if all nodes are on the hemisphere defined by the great circle). If yes, then this great circle is an edge of the convex hull. If, however a single node of the original polygon does not satisfy the constraint, then it isn't and you can discard this great circle.
The beauty of this is that once you converted your latitudes and longitudes into cartesian vectors pointing onto the unit sphere, it really just requires dot products and cross products
- You find the great circle that passes through two points on a sphere by its cross product
- A point is on the hemisphere defined by a great circle if the dot product of the great circle and the point is greater (or equal) to 0.
So even for polygons with a large number of edges, this brute force method should work just fine.
Suppose there's a set of 2D points to represent an initial simple polygon. Now I want to optimize the positions of each point according to some cost function. But this could make the polygon complex, i.e. the polygon intersects with itself. How can I avoid this? Thanks!
If the polygon could be presumed to be convex, then it is simple. Simply compute the angles between each side and the next side. Each angle must be between 0 and 180 degrees for a convex polygon. The sum of those angles is well known for a closed polygon with N sides. This will result in a simple constrained optimization. (Actually, you can write those constraints in a "simpler" form than computing the angles with a trigonometric function. Cross products will suffice.)
If the polygon need not be convex, then you need to worry about edges crossing, or other degeneracies.
Suppose there are a number of convex polygons on a plane, perhaps a map. These polygons can bump up against each other and share an edge, but cannot overlap.
To test if two polygons P and Q overlap, first I can test each edge in P to see if it intersects with any of the edges in Q. If an intersection is found, I declare that P and Q intersect. If none intersect, I then have to test for the case that P is completely contained by Q, and vice versa. Next, there's the case that P==Q. Finally, there's the case that share a few edges, but not all of them. (These last two cases can probably be thought of as the same general case, but that might not be important.)
I have an algorithm that detects where two line segments intersect. If the two segments are co-linear, they are not considered to intersect for my purposes.
Have I properly enumerated the cases? Any suggestions for testing for these cases?
Note that I'm not looking to find the new convex polygon that is the intersection, I just want to know if an intersection exists. There are many well documented algorithms for finding the intersection, but I don't need to go through all the effort.
You could use this collision algorithm:
To be able to decide whether two convex polygons are intersecting (touching each other) we can use the Separating Axis Theorem. Essentially:
If two convex polygons are not intersecting, there exists a line that passes between them.
Such a line only exists if one of the sides of one of the polygons forms such a line.
The first statement is easy. Since the polygons are both convex, you'll be able to draw a line with one polygon on one side and the other polygon on the other side unless they are intersecting. The second is slightly less intuitive. Look at figure 1. Unless the closest sided of the polygons are parallel to each other, the point where they get closest to each other is the point where a corner of one polygon gets closest to a side of the other polygon. This side will then form a separating axis between the polygons. If the sides are parallel, they both are separating axes.
So how does this concretely help us decide whether polygon A and B intersect? Well, we just go over each side of each polygon and check whether it forms a separating axis. To do this we'll be using some basic vector math to squash all the points of both polygons onto a line that is perpendicular to the potential separating line (see figure 2). Now the whole problem is conveniently 1-dimensional. We can determine a region in which the points for each polygon lie, and this line is a separating axis if these regions do not overlap.
If, after checking each line from both polygons, no separating axis was found, it has been proven that the polygons intersect and something has to be done about it.
There are several ways to detect intersection and / or containment between convex polygons. It all depends on how efficient you want the algorithm to be. Consider two convex polygons R and B with r and b vertices, respectively:
Sweep line based algorithm. As you mentioned you can perform a sweep line procedure and keep the intervals resulting from the intersection of the polygons with the sweeping line. If at any time the intervals overlap, then the polygons intersect. The complexity is O((r + b) log (r + b)) time.
Rotating Callipers based algorithm. See here and here for more details. The complexity is O(r + b) time.
The most efficient methods can be found here and here. These algorithms take O(log r + log b) time.
if the polygons are always convex, first calculate the angle of a line drawn from center to center of the polygons. you can then eliminate needing to test edge segments in the half of the polygon(s) 180 degrees away from the other polygon(s).
to eliminate the edges, Start with the polygon on the left. take the line segment from the center of the polygon that is perpendicular to the line segment from the previous bullet, and touches both sides of the polygon. call this line segment p, with vertexes p1 and p2. Then, for all vertexes if the x coordinate is less than p1.x and p2.x That vertex can go in the "safe bucket".
if it doesn't, you have to check to make sure it is on the "safe" side of the line (just check the y coordinates too)
-if a line segment in the polygon has all vertexes in the "safe bucket" you can ignore it.
-reverse the polarity so you are "right oriented" for the second polygon.
GJK collision detection should work.
Since altCognito already gave you a solution, I'll only point out an excellent book on computational geometry that might interest you.
Your test cases should work, since you're checking the case where the polygons don't intersect at all (completely outside or completely inside), as well as where there is any form of partial intersection (edges intersect always if there is overlap).
For testing, I would just make sure to test every potential combination. The one missing above from what I see is a single edge shared, but one poly contained in the other. I would also add tests for some more complex poly shapes, from tri -> many sided, just as a precaution.
Also, if you had a U shaped poly that completely surrounded the poly, but didn't overlap, I believe your case would handle that, but I would add that as a check, as well.
Here's an idea:
Find the center point of each polygon
Find the two points of each polygon closest to the center point of the other. They will be adjacent points in convex polygons. These define the nearest edge of each polygon, let's call the points {A, B} and {Y, Z}
Find the intersection of lines AB and YZ. If the line segments cross (the intersection on AB lies between A and B), your polygons intersect. If AB and XY are parallel ignore this condition, the next step will trap the problem.
There is one more case you need to check for, which is when the polygons intersect heavily enough that AB and XY are completely past each other and don't actually intersect.
To trap this case, calculate the perpendicular distances of AB and XY to each polygons center points. If either center point is closer to the opposite polygon's line segment your polygon overlap heavily.