Convex hulls of finite sets of points in two and three dimensions

  • Authors:
  • F. P. Preparata;S. J. Hong

  • Affiliations:
  • Univ. of Illinois, Urbana;IBM Systems Product Division, Poughkeepsie, NY

  • Venue:
  • Communications of the ACM
  • Year:
  • 1977

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Abstract

The convex hulls of sets of n points in two and three dimensions can be determined with O(n log n) operations. The presented algorithms use the “divide and conquer” technique and recursively apply a merge procedure for two nonintersecting convex hulls. Since any convex hull algorithm requires at least O(n log n) operations, the time complexity of the proposed algorithms is optimal within a multiplicative constant.