This is the preliminary version of a chapter that will appear in the Handbook on Computational Geometry, edited by J.-R. Sack and J. Urrutia. A comprehensive overview is given of algorithms and data structures for proximity problems on point sets in IR D . In particular, the closest pair problem, the exact and approximate post-office problem, and the problem of constructing spanners are discussed in detail. Contents 1 Introduction 1 2 The static closest pair problem 4 2.1 Preliminary remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 2.2 Algorithms that are optimal in the algebraic computation tree model . 5 2.2.1 An algorithm based on the Voronoi diagram . . . . . . . . . . . 5 2.2.2 A divide-and-conquer algorithm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 2.2.3 A plane sweep algorithm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 2.3 A deterministic algorithm that uses indirect addressing . . . . . . . . . 7 2.3.1 The degraded grid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...

The straight skeleton of a polygon is a variant of the medial axis, introduced by Aichholzer et al., defined by a shrinking process in which each edge of the polygon moves inward at a fixed rate. We construct the straight skeleton of an n-gon with r reflex vertices in time O(n 1+" +n 8=11+" r 9=11+" ), for any fixed " ? 0, improving the previous best upper bound of O(nr log n). Our algorithm simulates the sequence of collisions between edges and vertices during the shrinking process, using a technique of Eppstein for maintaining extrema of binary functions to reduce the problem of finding successive interactions to two dynamic range query problems: (1) maintain a changing set of triangles in IR 3 and answer queries asking which triangle would be first hit by a query ray, and (2) maintain a changing set of rays in IR 3 and answer queries asking for the lowest intersection of any ray with a query triangle. We also exploit a novel characterization of the straight skeleton as a ...

We maintain the minimum spanning tree of a point set in the plane, subject to point insertions and deletions, in amortized time O(n 1/2 log 2 n) per update operation. We reduce the problem to maintaining bichromatic closest pairs, which we solve in time O(n # ) per update. Our algorithm uses a novel construction, the ordered nearest neighbor path of a set of points. Our results generalize to higher dimensions, and to fully dynamic algorithms for maintaining minima of binary functions, including the diameter of a point set and the bichromatic farthest pair. 1 Introduction A dynamic geometric data structure is one that maintains the solution to some problem, defined on a geometric input such as a point set, as the input undergoes update operations such as insertions or deletions of single points. Dynamic algorithms have been studied for many geometric optimization problems, including closest pairs [7, 23, 25, 26], diameter [7, 26], width [4], convex hulls [15, 22], linear ...

We present a fully dynamic randomized data structure that can answer queries about the convex hull of a set of n points in three dimensions, where insertions take O(log 3 n) expected amortized time, deletions take O(log 6 n) expected amortized time, and extreme-point queries take O(log 2 n) worst-case time. This is the first method that guarantees polylogarithmic update and query cost for arbitrary sequences of insertions and deletions, and improves the previous O(n ε)-time method by Agarwal and Matouˇsek a decade ago. As a consequence, we obtain similar results for nearest neighbor queries in two dimensions and improved results for numerous fundamental geometric problems (such as levels in three dimensions and dynamic Euclidean minimum spanning trees in the plane). 1

We give the first nontrivial worst-case results for dynamic versions of various basic geometric optimization and measure problems under the semi-online model, where during the insertion of an object we are told when the object is to be deleted. Problems that we can solve with sublinear update time include the Hausdorff distance of two point sets, discrete 1-center, largest empty circle, convex hull volume in three dimensions, volume of the union of axis-parallel cubes, and minimum enclosing rectangle. The decision versions of the Hausdorff distance and discrete 1-center problems can be solved fully dynamically. Some applications are mentioned.

Inspired by dynamic connectivity applications in computational geometry, we consider a problem we call dynamic subgraph connectivity : design a data structure for an undirected graph G = (V, E) and a subset of vertices S # V , to support insertions and deletions in S and connectivity queries (are two vertices connected?) in the subgraph induced by S. We develop the first sublinear, fully dynamic method for this problem for general sparse graphs, using an elegant combination of several simple ideas. Our method requires linear space, # O(|E| 4#/(3#+3) ) = O(|E| 0.94 ) amortized update time, and # O(|E| 1/3 ) query time, where # is the matrix multiplication exponent and # O hides polylogarithmic factors.

Let S be a set whose items are sorted with respect to d ? 1 total orders OE 1 ; : : : ; OE d , and which is subject to dynamic operations, such as insertions of a single item, deletions of a single item, split and concatenate operations performed according to any chosen order OE i (1 i d). This generalizes to dimension d ? 1 the notion of concatenable data structures, such as the 2-3-trees, which support splits and concatenates under a single total order. The main contribution of this paper is a general and novel technique for solving order decomposable problems on S, which yields new and efficient concatenable data structures for dimension d ? 1. By using our technique we maintain S with the following time bounds: O(log n) for the insertion or the deletion of a single item, where n is the number of items currently in S; O(n 1\Gamma1=d ) for splits and concatenates along any order, and for rectangular range queries. The space required is O(n). We provide several applications of ...

Let P be a set of n points in the plane. The geometric minimum-diameter spanning tree (MDST) of P is a tree that spans P and minimizes the Euclidian length of the longest path. It is known that there is always a mono- or a dipolar MDST, i.e. a MDST whose longest path consists of two or three edges, respectively. The more difficult dipolar case can so far only be solved in O(n ) time.

We present three results related to dynamic convex hulls: • A fully dynamic data structure for maintaining a set of n points in the plane so that we can find the edges of the convex hull intersecting a query line, with expected query and amortized update time O(log 1+ε n) for an arbitrarily small constant ε> 0. This improves the previous bound of O(log 3/2 n). • A fully dynamic data structure for maintaining a set of n points in the plane to support halfplane range reporting queries in O(log n+k) time with O(polylog n) expected amortized update time. A similar result holds for 3-dimensional orthogonal range reporting. For 3-dimensional halfspace range reporting, the query time increases to O(log 2 n / log log n+k). • A semi-online dynamic data structure for maintaining a set of n line segments in the plane, so that we can decide whether a query line segment lies completely above the lower envelope, with query time O(log n) and amortized update time O(n ε). As a corollary, we can solve the following problem in O(n 1+ε) time: given a triangulated terrain in 3-d of size n, identify all faces that are partially visible from a fixed viewpoint. 1

Given a set of n colored points in some d-dimensional Euclidean space, a bichromatic closest (resp. farthest) pair is a closest (resp. farthest) pair of points of dierent colors. We present ecient algorithms to maintain both a bichromatic closest pair and a bichromatic farthest pair when the the points are xed but they dynamically change color. We do this by solving the more general problem of maintaining a bichromatic edge of minimum (resp. maximum) weight in an undirected weighted graph with colored vertices, when vertices dynamically change color.