On-line construction of the upper envelope of triangles and surface patches in three dimensions

In this paper, we describe a randomized incremental algorithm for computing the upper envelope (i.e., the pointwise maximum) of a set of n triangles in three dimensions. This algorithm is an on-line algorithm. It is structure-sensitive: the expected cost of inserting the n-th triangle is O(log nΣ_r=1ⁿτ(r)/r²) and depends on the expected size τ(r) of an intermediate result for r triangles. Since τ(r) can be Θ(r²(r)) in the worst case, this cost is bounded in the worst case by O(n(n) log n). (The expected behaviour is analyzed by averaging over all possible orderings of the input.) The main new characteristics is the use of a two-level history graph. (The history graph is an auxiliary data structure maintained by randomized incremental algorithms.) Our algorithm is fairly simple and appears to be efficient in practice. It extends to surfaces and surface patches of fixed maximum algebraic degree.