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In mathematics, a Voronoi diagram is a partitioning of a plane into regions based on distance to points in a specific subset of the plane. That set of points (called seeds, sites, or generators) is specified beforehand, and for each seed there is a corresponding region consisting of all points closer to that seed than to any other. These regions are called Voronoi cells. The Voronoi diagram of a set of points is dual to its Delaunay triangulation.
Contents
- The simplest case
- Formal definition
- Illustration
- Properties
- History and research
- Examples
- Higher order Voronoi diagrams
- Farthest point Voronoi diagram
- Generalizations and variations
- Natural sciences
- Health
- Engineering
- Geometry
- Informatics
- Algorithms
- References
It is named after Georgy Voronoi, and is also called a Voronoi tessellation, a Voronoi decomposition, a Voronoi partition, or a Dirichlet tessellation (after Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet). Voronoi diagrams have practical and theoretical applications to a large number of fields, mainly in science and technology but also including visual art. They are also known as Thiessen polygons.
The simplest case
In the simplest case, shown in the first picture, we are given a finite set of points {p1, …, pn} in the Euclidean plane. In this case each site pk is simply a point, and its corresponding Voronoi cell Rk consists of every point in the Euclidean plane whose distance to pk is less than or equal to its distance to any other pk. Each such cell is obtained from the intersection of half-spaces, and hence it is a convex polygon. The line segments of the Voronoi diagram are all the points in the plane that are equidistant to the two nearest sites. The Voronoi vertices (nodes) are the points equidistant to three (or more) sites.
Formal definition
Let
The Voronoi diagram is simply the tuple of cells
In the particular case where the space is a finite-dimensional Euclidean space, each site is a point, there are finitely many points and all of them are different, then the Voronoi cells are convex polytopes and they can be represented in a combinatorial way using their vertices, sides, 2-dimensional faces, etc. Sometimes the induced combinatorial structure is referred to as the Voronoi diagram. However, in general the Voronoi cells may not be convex or even connected.
In the usual Euclidean space, we can rewrite the formal definition in usual terms. Each Voronoi polygon
Illustration
As a simple illustration, consider a group of shops in a city. Suppose we want to estimate the number of customers of a given shop. With all else being equal (price, products, quality of service, etc.), it is reasonable to assume that customers choose their preferred shop simply by distance considerations: they will go to the shop located nearest to them. In this case the Voronoi cell
For most cities, the distance between points can be measured using the familiar Euclidean distance:
Properties
History and research
Informal use of Voronoi diagrams can be traced back to Descartes in 1644. Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet used 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional Voronoi diagrams in his study of quadratic forms in 1850. British physician John Snow used a Voronoi diagram in 1854 to illustrate how the majority of people who died in the Broad Street cholera outbreak lived closer to the infected Broad Street pump than to any other water pump.
Voronoi diagrams are named after Russian and Ukrainian mathematician Georgy Fedosievych Voronyi (or Voronoy) who defined and studied the general n-dimensional case in 1908. Voronoi diagrams that are used in geophysics and meteorology to analyse spatially distributed data (such as rainfall measurements) are called Thiessen polygons after American meteorologist Alfred H. Thiessen. In condensed matter physics, such tessellations are also known as Wigner–Seitz unit cells. Voronoi tessellations of the reciprocal lattice of momenta are called Brillouin zones. For general lattices in Lie groups, the cells are simply called fundamental domains. In the case of general metric spaces, the cells are often called metric fundamental polygons. Other equivalent names for this concept (or particular important cases of it): Voronoi polyhedra, Voronoi polygons, domain(s) of influence, Voronoi decomposition, Voronoi tessellation(s), Dirichlet tessellation(s).
Examples
Voronoi tessellations of regular lattices of points in two or three dimensions give rise to many familiar tessellations.
For the set of points (x, y) with x in a discrete set X and y in a discrete set Y, we get rectangular tiles with the points not necessarily at their centers.
Higher-order Voronoi diagrams
Although a normal Voronoi cell is defined as the set of points closest to a single point in S, an nth-order Voronoi cell is defined as the set of points having a particular set of n points in S as its n nearest neighbors. Higher-order Voronoi diagrams also subdivide space.
Higher-order Voronoi diagrams can be generated recursively. To generate the nth-order Voronoi diagram from set S, start with the (n − 1)th-order diagram and replace each cell generated by X = {x1, x2, ..., xn−1} with a Voronoi diagram generated on the set S − X.
Farthest-point Voronoi diagram
For a set of n points the (n − 1)th-order Voronoi diagram is called a farthest-point Voronoi diagram.
For a given set of points S = {p1, p2, ..., pn} the farthest-point Voronoi diagram divides the plane into cells in which the same point of P is the farthest point. A point of P has a cell in the farthest-point Voronoi diagram if and only if it is a vertex of the convex hull of P. Let H = {h1, h2, ..., hk} be the convex hull of P; then the farthest-point Voronoi diagram is a subdivision of the plane into k cells, one for each point in H, with the property that a point q lies in the cell corresponding to a site hi if and only if d(q, hi) > d(q, pj) for each pj ∈ S with hi ≠ pj, where d(p, q) is the Euclidean distance between two points p and q.
The boundaries of the cells in the farthest-point Voronoi diagram have the structure of a topological tree, with infinite rays as its leaves. Every finite tree is isomorphic to the tree formed in this way from a farthest-point Voronoi diagram.
Generalizations and variations
As implied by the definition, Voronoi cells can be defined for metrics other than Euclidean, such as the Mahalanobis distance or Manhattan distance. However, in these cases the boundaries of the Voronoi cells may be more complicated than in the Euclidean case, since the equidistant locus for two points may fail to be subspace of codimension 1, even in the 2-dimensional case.
A weighted Voronoi diagram is the one in which the function of a pair of points to define a Voronoi cell is a distance function modified by multiplicative or additive weights assigned to generator points. In contrast to the case of Voronoi cells defined using a distance which is a metric, in this case some of the Voronoi cells may be empty. A power diagram is a type of Voronoi diagram defined from a set of circles using the power distance; it can also be thought of as a weighted Voronoi diagram in which a weight defined from the radius of each circle is added to the squared distance from the circle's center.
The Voronoi diagram of n points in d-dimensional space requires
Voronoi diagrams are also related to other geometric structures such as the medial axis (which has found applications in image segmentation, optical character recognition, and other computational applications), straight skeleton, and zone diagrams. Besides points, such diagrams use lines and polygons as seeds. By augmenting the diagram with line segments that connect to nearest points on the seeds, a planar subdivision of the environment is obtained. This structure can be used as a navigation mesh for path-finding through large spaces. The navigation mesh has been generalized to support 3D multi-layered environments, such as an airport or a multi-storey building.
Natural sciences
Health
Engineering
Geometry
Informatics
Algorithms
Direct algorithms:
Starting with a Delaunay triangulation (obtain the dual):