Computing Elevation Maxima by Searching the Gauss Sphere

  • Authors:
  • Bei Wang;Herbert Edelsbrunner;Dmitriy Morozov

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA;Department of Computer Science, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA and Geomagic, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, USA;Department of Computer Science, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA

  • Venue:
  • SEA '09 Proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Experimental Algorithms
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

The elevation function on a smoothly embedded 2-manifold in ***3 reflects the multiscale topography of cavities and protrusions as local maxima. The function has been useful in identifying coarse docking configurations for protein pairs. Transporting the concept from the smooth to the piecewise linear category, this paper describes an algorithm for finding all local maxima. While its worst-case running time is the same as of the algorithm used in prior work, its performance in practice is orders of magnitudes superior. We cast light on this improvement by relating the running time to the total absolute Gaussian curvature of the 2-manifold.