Computational Geometry 42 (2009) 109–118
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Computational Geometry: Theory and Applications
www.elsevier.com/locate/comgeo
Off-centers: A new type of Steiner points for computing size-optimal
quality-guaranteed Delaunay triangulations
Alper Üngör
Department of Computer & Information Science & Engineering, University of Florida, USA
article info abstract
Article history:
Received 11 February 2007
Received in revised form 17 June 2008
Accepted 24 June 2008
Available online 3 July 2008
Communicated by P. Agarwal
Keywords:
Delaunay refinement
Computational geometry
Triangulations
We introduce a new type of Steiner points, called off-centers, as an alternative to
circumcenters, to improve the quality of Delaunay triangulations in two dimensions. We
propose a new Delaunay refinement algorithm based on iterative insertion of off-centers.
We show that this new algorithm has the same quality and size optimality guarantees of
the best known refinement algorithms. In practice, however, the new algorithm inserts
fewer Steiner points, runs faster, and generates smaller triangulations than the best
previous algorithms. Performance improvements are significant especially when user-
specified minimum angle is large, e.g., when the smallest angle in the output triangulation
is 30
◦
, the number of Steiner points is reduced by about 40%, while the mesh size is down
by about 30%. As a result of its shown benefits, the algorithm described here has already
replaced the well-known circumcenter insertion algorithm of Ruppert and has been the
default quality triangulation method in the popular meshing software
Triangle.
1
© 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
Triangulations (meshes consisting of triangles) are heavily used in many applications including engineering simulations,
computer-aided design, solid modeling, computer graphics, and scientific visualization. Most of these applications require
that the shape of the mesh elements are of good quality and that the size of the mesh is small. An element is said to be
good if its aspect ratio (circumradius over inradius) is bounded from above or its smallest angle is bounded from below.
Mesh element quality is critical in determining interpolation error in the applications and hence is an important factor in
the accuracy of simulations as well as the convergence speed. Mesh size, meaning the number of elements, is also a big
factor in the running time of the applications algorithm. Between two meshes with the same quality bound, the one with
fewer elements is preferred almost exclusively.
Among several types of domain discretizations, unstructured meshes, in particular Delaunay triangulations, are quite
popular due to their theoretical guarantees as well as their practical performance. Earliest algorithms that provide both size
optimality and quality guarantee used balanced quadtrees to generate first a nicely spread point set and then the Delaunay
triangulation of these points [1]. Subsequently, Delaunay refinement techniques are developed based on an incremental
point insertion strategy and provide the same theoretical guarantees [10]. Over the last decade, Delaunay refinement has
become much more popular than the quadtree-based algorithms mostly due to its superior performance in generating
smaller meshes. Many versions of the Delaunay refinement is suggested in the literature [2,6,8–11,13]. We attribute the large
amount of research on Delaunay refinement to its impact on a wide range of applications. It is important to generalize the
E-mail address: ungor@cise.ufl.edu.
1
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~quake/triangle.html.
0925-7721/$ – see front matter
© 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.comgeo.2008.06.002