Python - Convex Hull with Some Permissible Interior Points - python

I'd like to make a convex hull of a set of 2D points (in python). I've found several examples which have helped, but I have an extra feature I'd like that I haven't been able to implement. What I want to do is create the convex hull but allow it to pick up interior points if they are sufficiently "close" to the boundary. See the picture below -> if theta < x degrees, then that interior point gets added to the hull.
Obvious this can make things a bit more complex, as I've found out from my thoughts and tests. For example, if an interior point gets added, then it could potentially allow another further interior point to be added.
Speed is not really a concern here as the number of points I'll be working with will be relatively small. I'd rather have a more robust algorithm then a quick one.
I'm wondering if anyone knows of any such example or could point me in the right direction of where to start. Thanks.

Concave hull might be what you're looking for, though it doesn't use an angle as far as I know. The algorithm that the LOCAL project uses seems to use k nearest neighbours.

You could first compute the convex hull, and then ruin round the edges of that seeing if any of the edges should be broken to include an interior point.

The notion you are looking for may be alpha-shape. Tuning alpha, you admit more or less points in your concave hull. Look at Edelsbrunner algorithm for alpha-shape finding.

Related

Shortest distance between random points on a circle?

I am trying to test the accuracy of a few optimization algorithms on the traveling salesman problem.
I wanted to create a system where I always knew what the optimal solution is. My logic was that I would create a bunch of random points on a unit circle and thus would always know the shortest path because it would just be the order of the points on the circle. And how would I find the order? Well, just iterate through each point and find its closest neighbor. It turns out that it works most of the time, but sometimes... It doesn't!
Are there any suggestions for an algorithm that would find the optimal solution of random points on a unit circle 100% of the time? I like being able to just randomly create points on the circle.
You can compute a 100% accurate solution using a convex hull algorithm. This solution will be exact as long as the optimal TSP path is convex, which is the case for a simple circle. The monotone chain algorithm is very interesting because it is both very fast and trivial to understand (not to mention that the implementation is also provided by Wikipedia in many languages).
Jérôme Richard's answer works for this case and for all cases involving points on the boundary of a convex polygon, but there is an even simpler algorithm that also works for all these cases: For each point, just find the angle that a line through that point and the circle centre makes with a horizontal line through the circle centre, and sort the points by that.
If the origin (0, 0) is inside your circle, and your language has the atan2() function (most do -- it's a standard trig function), you can just apply atan2() to each point and sort them by that.

How to find a four point polygon approximation with OpenCV?

So I have a problem that requires me to get a perspective transform on a series of numbers. However, in order to get the four point transform, I need the correct points to send as parameters to the function. I couldn't find any methods that will solve this problem, and I've tried convex hull (returns more than four), minAreaRect (it returns a rectangle).
I don't have a lot of experience with OCR, but I would hope all the text segments live on the same perspective plane.
If so, how about using a simplified convex Hull (e.g. convexHull() then approxPolyDP) on one of seven connected components to get the points / compute perspective, then apply the same unwarp to an a scaled quad that encloses all the components ? (probably not perfect, but close)
Hopefully the snippets in this answer will help:
I really hope the same perspective transformation can be applied to each yellow text connected component.

How to select the minimal set of circles that covers another circle?

I'm looking for some solutions that, given a set S of circles with 2D-center points and radii, returns a minimal sub-set M in S that covers entirely a specific circle with 2d-center point and radius. This last circle is not in S.
I've chosen circles, but it doesn't matter if we change them to squares, hexagons, etc.
You have two distinct problems: you need to turn the geometric problem into a combinatoric problem, and then you need to solve the combinatoric problem. For the latter, you are looking at a minimum set cover problem, and there should be plenty of literature on that. Personally I like Knuth's Dancing Links approach to enumerate all solutions of a set cover, but I guess for a single minimal solution you can do better. A CPLEX formulation (to match your tag) would use a binary variable for each row, and a ≥1 constraint for each column.
So now about turning geometry into combinatorics. All the lines of all your circles divide the plane into a bunch of areas. The areas are delimited by lines. Of particular relevance are the points where two or more circles meet. The exact shape of the line between these points is less relevant, and you might imagine pulling those arcs straight to come up with a more classical planar graph representation. So compute all the pair-wise intersections between all your circles. Order all intersections of a single circle by angle and connect them with graph edges in that order. Do so for all circles. Then you can do a kind of bucket fill to determine for each circle which graph faces are within and which are outside.
Now you have your matrix for the set cover: every graph face which is inside the big circle is a column you need to cover. Every circle is a row and covers some of these faces, and you know which.

How do you generate the non-convex hull from a series of points?

I am currently trying to construct the area covered by a device over an operating period.
The first step in this process appears to be constructing a polygon of the covered area.
Since the pattern is not a standard shape, convex hulls overstate the covered area by jumping to the largest coverage area possible.
I have found a paper that appears to cover the concept of non-convex hull generation, but no discussions on how to implement this within a high level language.
http://www.geosensor.net/papers/duckham08.PR.pdf
Has anyone seen a straight forward algorithm for constructing a non-convex hull or concave hull or perhaps any python code to achieve the same result?
I have tried convex hulls mainly qhull, with a limited edge size with limited success.
Also I have noticed some licensed libraries that will not be able to be distributed, so unfortunately thats off the table.
Any better ideas or cookbooks?
You might try looking into Alpha Shapes. The CGAL library can compute them.
Edit: I see that the paper you linked references alpha shapes, and also has an algorithm listing. Is that not high level enough for you? Since you listed python as a tag, I'm sure there are Delaunay triangulation libraries in Python, which I think is the hardest part of implementing the algorithm; you just need to make sure you can modify the resulting triangulation output. The boundary query functions can probably be implemented with associative arrays.

How do you calculate the area of a series of random points?

So I'm working on a piece of code to take positional data for a RC Plane Crop Duster and compute the total surface area transversed (without double counting any area). I cannot figure out how to calculate the area for a given period of operation.
Given the following Table Calculate the area the points cover.
x,y
1,2
1,5
4,3
6,6
3,4
3,1
Any Ideas? I've browsed Greens Theorem and I'm left without a practical concept in which to code.
Thanks for any advise
Build the convex hull from the given points
Algorithms are described here
See a very nice python demo + src
Calculate its area
Python code is here
Someone mathier than me may have to verify the information here. But it looks legit: http://www.wikihow.com/Calculate-the-Area-of-a-Polygon and fairly easy to apply in code.
I'm not entirely sure that you're looking for "Surface area" as much as you're looking for Distance. It seems like you want to calculate the distance between one point and the next for that list. If that's the case, simply use the Distance Formula.
If the plane drops a constant width of dust while flying between those points, then the area is simply the distance between those points times the width of the spray.
If your points are guaranteed to be on an integer grid - as they are in your example - (and you really are looking for enclosed area) would Pick's Theorem help?
You will have to divide the complex polygon approximately into standard polygons (triangles, rectangles etc) and then find area of all of them. This is just like regular integration (only difference is that you are yet to find a formula to approximate your data).
The above points are when you assume that you are forming a closed polygon with your data.
Use to QHull to triangulate the region, then sum the areas of the resulting triangles.
Python now conveniently has a library that implements the method Lior provided. https://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/generated/scipy.spatial.ConvexHull.html will calculate the convex hull for any N dimensional space and calculate the area/volume for you as well. See the example and return value attributes towards the bottom of the page for details.

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