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Randomized incremental construction of Delaunay and Voronoi diagrams

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Abstract

In this paper we give a new randomized incremental algorithm for the construction of planar Voronoi diagrams and Delaunay triangulations. The new algorithm is more “on-line” than earlier similar methods, takes expected timeO(nℝgn) and spaceO(n), and is eminently practical to implement. The analysis of the algorithm is also interesting in its own right and can serve as a model for many similar questions in both two and three dimensions. Finally we demonstrate how this approach for constructing Voronoi diagrams obviates the need for building a separate point-location structure for nearest-neighbor queries.

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Communicated by Kurt Mehlhorn.

Leonidas Guibas and Micha Sharir wish to acknowledge the generous support of the DEC Systems Research Center in Palo Alto, California, where some of this work was carried out. Donald Knuth has been supported by NSF Grant CCR-86-10181. Micha Sharir has been supported by NSF Grant CCR-89-01484, ONR Grant N00014-K-87-0129, the U.S.-Israeli Binational Science Foundation, and the Fund for Basic Research administered by the Israeli Academy of Sciences.

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Guibas, L.J., Knuth, D.E. & Sharir, M. Randomized incremental construction of Delaunay and Voronoi diagrams. Algorithmica 7, 381–413 (1992). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01758770

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