Voronoi diagrams from convex hulls

Abstract

The problem of construction of planar Voronoi diagrams arises in many areas, one of the most important of which is in nearest neighbor problems. This includes clustering [ 141, contour maps [6] and (Euclidean) minimum spanning trees [23]. Shamos [22] gives several more applications. An JZ(N log N) time worst case lower bound can be shown for this problem by reducing it to sorting [2 11. The challenge is to construct an O(N log N) time algorithm. Shamos [213 and Shamos anti Hoey [23] describe an O(N log N) time divide-and-conquer algorithm for construction of the planar Euclidean Voronoi diagram. Lee and Wong [ 161 describe an O(N log N) time algorithm for the L1 and L, metrics in the plane, and Drysdale pnd Lee [8] present an O(N@g N)l/*) t’ rme algorithm for the Voronoi diagram of N line segments (which they have since improved to O(N(log N)*) time). Shamos [2 11, Lee and Preparata [ 151, and Lipton and Tarjan [ 171 have produced fast algorithms for searching a Voronoi diagram (or any other straight-line planar graph). In this paper we describe an O(N log N) time algorithm for constructing a planar Euclidean Voronoi diagram which extends straightforwardly to higher dimensions. The fundamental result is that a K-dimensional Euclidean Voronoi diagram of N points can be constructed by transforming the points to K + I-space,