Lets say I have a set of points and I have lines/edges between them. All of these edges create non-overlapping triangles within the convex hull of my points. All points are connected to triangles.
How can I efficiently check which points are part of which triangle? I could check incident points of each edge and gradually construct a triple of points, but that sounds awefully slow (o(n^2)?). Is there something like linesweep or so to do that?
cheers.
The edges define an undirected graph G and the triangles are the set of cycles in G with length=3.
Geometric triangulations typically have relatively low nodal degree (degree d is the number of edges adjacent to each node, d<=10 is typical for geometric triangulations) and, as such, here is a reasonably efficient O(n*d^3) algorithm that can be used to construct the set of triangles.
Setup a graph-like data structure, supporting access to the list of edges adjacent to each node.
Iterate over all nodes. Consider all pairs of edges adjacent to a given node i. For a given pair of edges adjacent to i, we have a potential nodal triplet i,j,k. This triplet is a triangle if there is an edge joining nodes j,k, which can be checked by scanning the edge lists of j,k.
Duplicate triangles will be generated by a naive implementation of (2). Maintain a hash table of triangles to reject duplicate triplets as they're considered.
I've assumed that the edges define a valid disjoint triangulation, being non-intersecting, etc.
Hope this helps.