Shortest paths among obstacles in the plane

  • Authors:
  • Joseph S. B. Mitchell

  • Affiliations:
  • -

  • Venue:
  • SCG '93 Proceedings of the ninth annual symposium on Computational geometry
  • Year:
  • 1993

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Abstract

We give a subquadratic (O(n5/3+&egr;) time and space) algorithm for computing Euclidean shortest paths in the plane in the presence of polygonal obstacles; previous time bounds were at least quadratic in n, in the worst-case. The method avoids use of visibility graphs, relying instead on the continuous Dijkstra paradigm. The output is a shortest path map (of size O(n)) with respect to a given source point, which allows shortest path length queries to be answered in time O(log n). The algorithm extends to the case of multiple source points, yielding a geodesic Voronoi diagram within the same time bound.