Exact Minkowski Sums of Polygons With Holes

Abstract

We present an efficient algorithm that computes the Minkowski sum of two polygons, which may have holes. The new algorithm is based on the convolution approach. Its efficiency stems in part from a property for Minkowski sums of polygons with holes, which in fact holds in any dimension: Given two polygons with holes, for each input polygon we can fill up the holes that are relatively small compared to the other polygon. Specifically, we can always fill up all the holes of at least one polygon, transforming it into a simple polygon, and still obtain exactly the same Minkowski sum. Obliterating holes in the input summands speeds up the computation of Minkowski sums. We introduce a robust implementation of the new algorithm, which follows the Exact Geometric Computation paradigm and thus guarantees exact results. We also present an empirical comparison of the performance of Minkowski sum construction of various input examples, where we show that the implementation of the new algorithm exhibits better performance than several other implementations in many cases. In particular, we compared the implementation of the new algorithm, an implementation of the standard convolution algorithm, and an implementation of the decomposition approach using various convex decomposition methods, including two new methods that handle polygons with holes - one is based on vertical decomposition and the other is based on triangulation. The software has been developed as an extension of the "2D Minkowski Sums" package of CGAL (Computational Geometry Algorithms Library). Additional information and supplementary material is available at our project page http://acg.cs.tau.ac.il/projects/rc