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- Newsgroups: comp.graphics
- Path: sparky!uunet!news.smith.edu!orourke
- From: orourke@sophia.smith.edu (Joseph O'Rourke)
- Subject: Re: How to find minimal bounding circle of a polygon?
- Message-ID: <1992Dec14.021651.14044@sophia.smith.edu>
- Organization: Smith College, Northampton, MA, US
- References: <24405@hacgate.SCG.HAC.COM>
- Date: Mon, 14 Dec 1992 02:16:51 GMT
- Lines: 26
-
- In article <24405@hacgate.SCG.HAC.COM> shek@aic.hrl.hac.com (Eddie C. Shek) writes:
- >[...] the minimal bounding circle is defined as
- >the smallest circle that covers the polygon.
- >
- >Are there any algorithms that find the minimal bounding circle
- >of a 2-D polygon (or equivalently, a set of 2-D points)?
-
- Yes. There is a beautiful connection between this problem and the
- furthest-point Voronoi diagram: the center of a minimum spanning
- circle lies on this diagram, at a vertex if the circle touches
- the polygon at three points. So constructing the f-p Vor diag.
- almost gets you there. And that diagram is easily obtained from
- a three-dimensional convex hull.
- But this is not the only way to do it. An unusual approach
- can be found in this paper:
-
- @incollection{Melville
- , author = "R. C. Melville"
- , title = "An implementation study of two algorithms for the minimum spanning circle problem"
- , editor = "G. T. Toussaint"
- , booktitle = "Computational Geometry"
- , publisher = "North-Holland"
- , address = "Amsterdam, Netherlands"
- , year = 1985
- , pages = "267--294"
- }
-