Optimal Volume-Sensitive Bounds for Polytope Approximation

Abstract

Approximating convex bodies is a fundamental question in geometry, which has a wide variety of applications. Given a convex body $K$ in $\textbf{R}^d$ for fixed $d$, the objective is to minimize the number of facets of an approximating polytope for a given Hausdorff error $\varepsilon$. It is known that $O((\text{diam}(K)/\varepsilon)^{(d-1)/2})$ facets suffice and are necessary for many instances, such as the Euclidean ball. However, this bound is far from optimal for ``skinny'' convex bodies. A natural way to characterize the skinniness of a convex object is in terms of its relationship to the Euclidean ball. Given a convex body $K$, its \emph{volume diameter} $\Delta_d(K)$ is defined to be the diameter of a Euclidean ball of the same volume as $K$. The \emph{surface diameter} $\Delta_{d-1}(K)$ is defined analogously for surface area. It follows from generalizations of the isoperimetric inequality that $\text{diam}(K) \geq \Delta_{d-1}(K) \geq \Delta_d(K)$. Arya, da Fonseca, and Mount proved that the diameter-based bound could be made sensitive to the surface diameter, improving the above bound to $O((\Delta_{d-1}(K)/\varepsilon)^{(d-1)/2})$. In this paper, we strengthen this by proving the existence of an approximation with $O((\Delta_d(K)/\varepsilon)^{(d-1)/2})$ facets. As a function of volume alone, this bound is tight up to constant factors. Our improvements arise from a combination of new ideas. We exploit known properties of the original body and its polar dual. In order to obtain a volume-sensitive bound, we explore the problem of computing a low-complexity polytope that is sandwiched between two given convex bodies. We show that this problem can be reduced to a covering problem involving a natural intermediate body based on the harmonic mean. Our proof relies on a geometric analysis of a relative notion of fatness involving these bodies.