A linear bound on the complexity of the delaunay triangulation of points on polyhedral surfaces

Abstract

Delaunay triangulations and Voronoi diagrams have found numerous applications in surface modeling, surface mesh generation, deformable surface modeling and surface reconstruction. Many algorithms in these applications begin by constructing the three-dimensional Delaunay triangulation of a finite set of points scattered over a surface. Their running-time therefore depends on the complexity of the Delaunay triangulation of such point sets. Although the complexity of the Delaunay triangulation of points may be quadratic in the worst-case, we show in this paper that it is only linear when the points are distributed on a fixed number of well-sampled facets (e.g. the facets of a polyhedron). Our bound is deterministic and the constants are explicitly given.