FINDING PLANAR REGIONS IN A TERRAIN – IN PRACTICE AND WITH A GUARANTEE
Stefan Funke, Theocharis Malamatos, Rahul Ray · International Journal of Computational Geometry & Applications · 2005
We consider the problem of computing large connected regions in a triangulated terrain of size n for which the normals of the triangles deviate by at most some small fixed angle. In previous work an exact near-quadratic algorithm was presented, but only a heuristic implementation with no guarantee was practicable. We present a new approximation algorithm for the problem which runs in O(n/∊2) time and—apart from giving a guarantee on the quality of the produced solution—has been implemented and shows good performance on real data sets representing fracture surfaces consisting of around half a million triangles. Further we present a simple approximation algorithm for a related problem: given a set of n points in the plane, determine the placement of the unit disk which contains most points. This algorithm runs in linear time as well.