A parallel algorithm for computing Voronoi diagram of a set of spheres using restricted lower envelope approach and topology matching

Abstract

We present a parallel algorithm for computing the Voronoi diagram of a set of spheres, S in R3. The spheres have varying radii and do not intersect. We compute each Voronoi cell independently using a two-stage iterative procedure, assuming the input spheres are in general position. In the first stage, an initial Voronoi cell for a sphere si is computed using an iterative lower envelope approach restricted to a subset of spheres Li⊂S. This helps to avoid defining the bisectors between all pairs of input spheres and develop a distributed memory parallel algorithm. We use the Delaunay graph of sample points from the input spheres to select the subset Li for computing each Voronoi cell. In the second stage, Voronoi cells obtained from the first stage are matched for updating the subsets. If additional spheres are added to a subset Li, the correctness of the computed vertices is verified with the bisectors of spheres newly added to Li. Results and performance of the algorithm show robustness and speed of the algorithm in handling a large set of spheres.