Selecting distances in the plane

  • Authors:
  • Pankaj K. Agarwal;Boris Aronov;Micha Sharir;Subhash Suri

  • Affiliations:
  • DIMACS, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ;DIMACS, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ;Department of Computer Science, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, New York, NY and School of Mathematical Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel;Bellcore, Morristown, NJ

  • Venue:
  • SCG '90 Proceedings of the sixth annual symposium on Computational geometry
  • Year:
  • 1990

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Abstract

We describe a randomized algorithm for computing the kth smallest distance in a set of n points in the plane, based on the parametric search technique of Megiddo [Me1]. The expected running time of our algorithm is &Ogr;(n4/3 log 8/3 n). A deterministic version of our procedure runs in time &Ogr;(n3/2 log5/2 n). Both versions improve the previously best known upper bound of &Ogr;(n9/5 log4/5 n) by Chazelle [Ch]. A simple &Ogr;(n log n) time algorithm for computing an approximation of the median distance is also presented.