A new 2D tessellation for angle problems: the polar diagram (Q2489015)

The authors propose a plane partition with similar features to those of the Voronoi Diagram, but the Euclidean minimum distance criterion is replaced for the minimal angle criterion. More precisely, the result presented is a new tessellation of the plane in regions called polar diagram, in which every site is owner of a polar region as the locus of points with smallest polar angle respect to this site. Using this tessellation as preprocessing, exhaustive searches to find those sites with smallest angle become unnecessary. This information is intrinsic to the polar diagram data structure, and provides a similar solution to the given for the Voronoi diagrams in proximity problems. Moreover, it is proved that polar diagrams, used as preprocessing, can be applied to many problems in computational geometry in order to speed up their processing times. Some of these applications are the convex hull, visibility problems, and path planning problems.