New Algorithms for Computer Graphics

Abstract

1. Introduction The area of computational geometry deals with the study of algorithms for problems concerning geometric objects like e.g. lines, polygons, circles, etc. in the plane and in higher dimensional space. Since its introduction in 1976 by Shamos the field has developed rapidly and nowadays there are even special conferences and journals devoted to the topic. A list of publications by Edelsbrunner and van Leeuwen [6J collected in 1982 already contained over 650 papers. And this number has rapidly increased since then. Clearly, a large number of problems in computer graphics deals with geometric objects as well. Examples are hidden line elimination, windowing prob­ lems, intersection problems, etc. Hence, computer graphics can benefit from the techniques developed in computational geometry. In computational geometry many new sophisticated data structures and algo­