Streaming computation of Delaunay triangulations

  • Authors:
  • Martin Isenburg;Yuanxin Liu;Jonathan Shewchuk;Jack Snoeyink

  • Affiliations:
  • University of California at Berkeley;University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill;University of California at Berkeley;University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  • Venue:
  • ACM SIGGRAPH 2006 Papers
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

We show how to greatly accelerate algorithms that compute Delaunay triangulations of huge, well-distributed point sets in 2D and 3D by exploiting the natural spatial coherence in a stream of points. We achieve large performance gains by introducing spatial finalization into point streams: we partition space into regions, and augment a stream of input points with finalization tags that indicate when a point is the last in its region. By extending an incremental algorithm for Delaunay triangulation to use finalization tags and produce streaming mesh output, we compute a billion-triangle terrain representation for the Neuse River system from 11.2 GB of LIDAR data in 48 minutes using only 70 MB of memory on a laptop with two hard drives. This is a factor of twelve faster than the previous fastest out-of-core Delaunay triangulation software.