Preconditioning 2D integer data for fast convex hull computations

Cadenas, J. O., Megson, G. M. and Luengo Hendriks, C. L. (2016) Preconditioning 2D integer data for fast convex hull computations. PLoS ONE, 11 (3). e0149860. ISSN 1932-6203 doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0149860

Abstract/Summary

In order to accelerate computing the convex hull on a set of n points, a heuristic procedure is often applied to reduce the number of points to a set of s points, s ≤ n, which also contains the same hull. We present an algorithm to precondition 2D data with integer coordinates bounded by a box of size p × q before building a 2D convex hull, with three distinct advantages. First, we prove that under the condition min(p, q) ≤ n the algorithm executes in time within O(n); second, no explicit sorting of data is required; and third, the reduced set of s points forms a simple polygonal chain and thus can be directly pipelined into an O(n) time convex hull algorithm. This paper empirically evaluates and quantifies the speed up gained by preconditioning a set of points by a method based on the proposed algorithm before using common convex hull algorithms to build the final hull. A speedup factor of at least four is consistently found from experiments on various datasets when the condition min(p, q) ≤ n holds; the smaller the ratio min(p, q)/n is in the dataset, the greater the speedup factor achieved.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/62042
Identification Number/DOI	10.1371/journal.pone.0149860
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Science
Publisher	Public Library of Science
Download/View statistics	View download statistics for this item