Fast Convex Hull by a Geometric Approach

Abstract

Advances in sensors and cameras allow current research in convex hull algorithms to focus on defining methods capable of processing a big set of points. Typically, in most of these algorithms, the orientation function needs around five sums and two multiplications. In this paper, we propose SymmetricHull, a novel algorithm that, unlike the related ones, only performs two comparisons per point, discarding points with a low probability of belonging to the convex hull. Our algorithm takes advantage of the symmetric geometry of convex hulls in 2D spaces and relies on the convexity principle to get convex hulls, without needing further calculations. Our experiments show that SymmetricHull achieves good results, in terms of time and number of necessary operations, resulting especially efficient with sets of points between $10^4$ and $10^7$. Given that our datasets are organized by quadrants, the features of our algorithm can be summarized as follows: (1) a fast point discard based on known points with a good chance to be part of the convex hull, (2) a lexicographic sort of points with a high probability of belonging to the convex hull, and (3) a simple slope analysis to verify whether a point is within the convex hull or not.