Is there an algorithm to generate a graph outline? - c#

I've searched the Internet and maybe I'm missing some correct keywords but I managed to find nothing like this. I only found the poly-lines (or just the lines) which are not exactly the graphs. I would like to generate a graph outline (of radius r) as seen in the picture. Is there something already available? I would like to avoid reinventing the wheel so to speak.
If anyone can at hint me at something or at least at some basic principle how to do it it would be great. Otherwise I'll "invent" one on my own of course.
Optimally in C#.
Update: I need to calculate outline polygon, not just visually draw it. The green points represents the resulting polygon. Also the "inner" holes are ignored completely. Only one outline polygon should be enough.
Update 2: Better picture to show some more extreme cases. Also the edges of graph never overlap so no need to accommodate for that.
Update 3: Picture updated yet again to reflect the bevel joins.

First, for every "line piece" from point A to B, generate the rectangle to it (all 4 points as "path", so to say). Then search two overlapping rectangles and merge them:
Merging is a bit complicated, the idea: Start with calculating the angle of all 8 lines (eg. if the rectangles are traversed clockwise). Then traverse one rectangle until the first line-line-intersection, check with the angles which direction is "outside", and move along the crossing line of the second rectangle ... until you arrive at the start point again => Now you traversed the shape of both together (and hopefully saved it somewhere).
Merge until only one large piece is left (or multiple non-overlapping pieces). In theory, starting from any point, you can traverse the whole shape, but there´s another problem: Holes are possible.
If one shape has two or more disjuct sets of points (where no point from set 2 is reachable from set 1 and vice-versa), all but one disjunct path is of a hole. An easy possibility to get the real outer border is to search for an extremum, ie. the point with the largest or smallest X or Y coordinate (only one of the 4 combinations in enough). This point surely is a part of the outer border.

Related

How to find a shape in a series of mouse clicks?

I was wondering how (if at all) it would be possible to determine a shape given a set of X,Y coordinates of mouse clicks?
We're dealing with a number of issues here, there may be clicks (coords) which are irrelevant to the shape. Here is an example: http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=286tlkx&s=6 The green dots represent mouse clicks, and the search is for a square at least x in height/width, at most y in height/width and compromised of four points, the red lines indicate the shape found. I'd like to be able to find a number of basic shapes, such as squares, rectangles, triangles and ideally circles too.
I've heard that Least Squares is something that would help me, but it's not clear to me how this would help me if at all. I'm using C# and examples are more than welcome :)
You can create detectors for each shape you want to support. These detectors will tell, if a set of points form the shape.
So for example you would pass 4 points to the quad detector and it returns, if the 4 points are aligned in a quad or not. The quad detector could work like this:
for each point
find the closest neighbour point
compute the inner angle
compute the distance to the neighbours
if all inner angles are 90° +- some threshold -> ok
if all distances are equal +- some threshold (percentage) -> ok
otherwise it is no quad.
A naive way to use these detectors is to pass every subset of points to them. If you have enough time, then this is the easiest way. If you want to achieve some performance, you can select the points to pass a bit smarter.
E.g. if quads are always axis aligned, you can start at any point, go right until you hit another point (again with some thresold), go down, go left.
Those are just some thoughts that might help you further. I can imagine that there are algorithms in AI that can solve this problem in a more pragmatic way, maybe neural networks.

Draw shapes given list of lines

I am working with C# OpenTK, but any code in C++ OpenGL is fine, i understand it.
I have a list of Markers. A Marker is defined as a 2 coordinate, and a pointer to the next marker in the loop. Essentially, if you were to follow the path of those pointers, you would eventually reach the Marker you started with. This is how shapes are initially defined.
One of those 'loops' may not be all the markers in the list. Multiple 'loops' may be contained. Take the letter 'A' for example:
This shape here would be defined by 2 'loops'. One is the outline (8 Markers), while the other loop would be the triangle within (3 Markers).
(Marker - Pointer)
1-2, 2-3, 3-4, 4-5, 5-6, 6-7, 7-8, 8-1
9-10, 10-11, 11-9
I need a method that will allow me to draw something like this to the screen. The solutions stated here would correctly solve the issue on a bitmap level (going through pixel after pixel to check if it within the polygon), however would be quite inefficient, especially given the fact that these markers shall be moved continuously at run time.
It is required that these shapes should be able to include things such as the triangle in an A (inverting), and preferably would allow for overlapping boundaries of the 'loops', but this second thing is not a necessity.
I'm guessing the direction taken will either be some sort of conversion to triangles, or some fancy trick with built in OpenGL features.
You're looking for triangulation with holes.
Check out the General Polygon Clipper (GPC).

Find if one Polygon is inside another

I want to find out if one polygon is inside another by giving an array of points of each vertex. Is there any simple way to do that?
Edit: it's not enough to check whether minimum point of inner is greater than outer and maximum point for outer is less then inner. It's not the sufficient condition. Proof:
Once you've checked that the minimum bounding box for polygon A lies inside that for polygon B I think you're going to have to check each edge of A for non-intersection with all the edges of B.
This is, I think, a simple approach, but I suspect you really want a clever approach which is more efficient.
I have done something very similar using Java2D particularly the Area class. The code for that class is freely available if you want to replicate the functionality. An easier option might be to look at this library: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~toby/alan/software/ It should allow you to do what you want or give you starting points anyway.
some point of polygon1 lies inside of polygon2
you can use ray casting here
there are no edge-edge intersection between polygons
for large numbers of edges space-partition trees may increase speed, for small number of edges N*M enumeration is OK
First, use axis-aligned boundary boxes to see if they're anywhere near one another. (Essentially, draw an X-Y aligned box around each one and see if they are intersecting. This is MUCH easier than the case for polygons and generally saves a lot of time.)
If the boxes intersect, you should now perform detailed intersection testing. You'll want to draw a line perpendicular to each side of the "outside" polygon and project all of the points from both of them onto the line. Then, check that the resulting points for the inside polygon are between the points projected from the outside polygon.
I understand that example is difficult to visualize at first- I recommend this tutorial about collision detection to people interested in this area:
http://www.wildbunny.co.uk/blog/2011/04/20/collision-detection-for-dummies/
However, your task is slightly different as mentioned because you are projecting onto the perpendicular line for each side and you need ALL of them to contain the segment. I also suggest boning up a bit on the notion of a projection and your linear algebra if you want to do a lot of this.
Your question is underdetermined - just giving the coordinates of each vertex is not enough to specify a polygon. Example: draw a square and fill in the diagonals. Your five vertices are the square's corners and the point at the diagonals' intersection. From these vertices, it is possible to construct four different polygons: each one is constructed by using the edges of the original drawing, while removing one single edge from the square and limiting the diagonals (I hope this is clear enough).
EDIT: Apparently it wasn't clear enough. Let a1, a2, a3, a4 be vertices corresponding to the four points of a square (say, clockwise from top left), and let a5 be a vertex corresponding to the intersection of the square's diagonals. Just for the sake of the example, here are two polygons which fit the above vertices:
1. (a1,a2),(a2,a5),(a5,a3),(a3,a4),(a4,a1). This should look like a right-facing pacman.
2. (a1,a2),(a2,a3),(a3,a4),(a4,a5),(a5,a1). This should look like a left-facing pacman.

Which spatial data structure (algorithm) is best for (searching in) a set of regions (spacial data)?

I have a set of regions (geo-fences) which are polygons. This set of data is fixed; so there is no need for insertion and deletion of data. Which data structure can be used for searching for regions that a query point (longitude, latitude) is in it?
Note: I have implemented KD-Tree (In fact a 2D-Tree) successfully for a set of points. But it does not work for this problem. I have implemented an R-Tree then; and it solves the problem but it is slow (or my implementation sucks).
Thank you
Note: I have worked on R-Tree implementation and it works fine now.
Since you are not inserting/deleting and presumably have plenty of time to preprocess the data, you can use some additional memory to speed up computations. The basic idea for pre-processing:
Take all of the polygon points and determine the smallest axis-aligned bounding rectangle that contains them all; basically this is the min and max of X and Y.
Choose a partioning factor dX and dY that you will use to create a search grid. Choosing powers of two for the partioning factors can make for slightly faster computation later.
Translate the polygon data so that their bounding rectangle minimum is coincident with (0,0) and expand the rectangle so that it is an integer multiple of the partitioning factor in each dimension.
Consider each grid square and make a list of the polygons that intersect the square. Store this list for each grid square. Depending on the nature of the data (how many polygons you can ever expect to intersect a square), there are various ways you can optimize this for either storage space or speed.
Now, when you want to find regions that contain a point:
Translate the point using the origin we defined earlier and determine the grid square containing the point (if you used a power of two, this is a shift operation; otherwise it's division.)
Look at the list for the grid square. If it's empty, there is no containing polygon. If not, you have to consider each of the polygons in the list and search for intersection.
This works well for spread out and mostly non-intersecting polygons, particularly if you can choose a grid size fine enough so that there are only a few polygons per square. It will be slow in cases where you hit squares with lots of intersecting polygons. One additional optimization is to have a flag for each listed polygon at a square to indicate that the square is completely contained within the polygon; this allows you to avoid the slow containment test in many cases at the cost of a single bit per polygon entry. This is particularly valuable if your grid spacing is fine compared to the polygon sizes, as most squares will not be at intersections or edges.
If you need even more speed, you can start storing edge information at each square with the polygon reference. You only need to test against the polygon edges that actually intersect the area of the square. This can reduce the effort to only a handful of edge tests per polygon.
A R-Tree data structure can be used for this problem.

Find smallest irregular polygon from combination of vertices (Performance Critical)

I need to find an irregular polygon with the smallest surface area out of several vertices on a 2D plane.
No this isn't homework. Although I wish I was back in school right now.
There are some requirements on how the polygon can be constructed. Let's say I have 3 different types of vertices (red, green, blue) plotted out on a 8x8 grid. I need to scan all vertices in this grid satisfying the red, green, blue combination requirement and pick the one with the smallest surface area.
Getting the surface area of an irregular polygon is simple enough. I'm mainly concerned about the performance of scanning all possible combinations efficiently.
See the below image for an example. All three types are used to make the polygons however the one circled has the smallest surface area and is my objective.
This scenario is simplified compared to what I'm trying to prototype. The polygons will be constructed of tens if not hundreds of vertices and the grid will be much larger. Also, this will be a process ran 24/7.
I was thinking that maybe I should organize the vertices by type and break them into individual arrays. Then just iterate over the arrays in a tiered fashion to compute the surface area of all combinations. This approach however seems wasteful.
Here is a version based on branch and bound, with some flourishes.
1) Break the grid down into a Quadtree, with annotations in the nodes as needed for the rest.
2) Find the lowest node in the quad tree that has one of each type of node. This gives you a starting solution, which should be at least good enough to speed up the rest of the search.
3) Do a recursive search which takes all possible branches where I say guess, choosing the most promising candidates first where applicable:
3a) Guess a vertex of the least common type.
3b) Using the relative location of points in the quad tree to order your guesses, guess a vertex of the next least common type, so as to guess them in increasing order of distance form the original point...
3z) you have a complete set of vertices.
At each step 3? you have a partial set of vertices, which I presume gives you a lower bound on the area of any complete solution including those vertices (is it the area inside the convex hull of the vertices?). You can discard any partial solutions that are already at least as large as the largest solutions so far. If you can live with an answer that is X% inaccurate, you can discard any partial solutions that are within X% of the largest solution so far. Hopefully this prunes the tree of possibilies you are navigating in (3) far enough to make it tractable.
How about picking the color with the least number of vertices, and checking for each one the immediate neighborhood, if none has the other colors within this neighborhood, increase the stencil size (select next ring around the vertex), and check again. Until at least one of the vertices, has all other colors within the current stencil. If there are more than one, you just need to compare those (simple min reduction) to find the smallest one.
Here's how to find the smallest triangle in time O(n2 log n). Perhaps it will be useful to you.
The high-level idea is to use a rotating sweep-line. At all times we maintain the order of the blue points along the axis perpendicular to the sweep-line, in a binary search tree. When the sweep-line is parallel with the line passing through a red-green pair, we use the BST to find the blue point closest to the red-green line.
As always, we use an event-driven simulation of the sweep-line. For each red-green pair, make one kind of event for its angle. For each pair of blue points, make O(1) of another kind of event for when their relative order changes. Sort all of the events and turn the crank.
If we already have found an area A, we can narrow the search.
The area of a triangle is B*h (base times height).
If you find two points, then B is the distance between them.
Then we can search for a point which is at most A/B (B*h < A => h < A/B) distance from that line. This is the same as searching between two lines parallel to the two points we already have, which are displaced A/B and -A/B.
This should give a complexity of O(n^2*k) where k is the width or height of your grid.
If you don't extract the coordinates you have to do a O(k^5) search, which at least is better than O(k^6) you had to do earlier.
Some more analysis: if p is the probability that a cell contains a vertex then the complexity is: O(k^2p(k^2p(kp))) = O(k^5p^3).
If p=n/k^2, where n is the number of nodes we then get O(n^3/k).

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