9 Delaunay Triangulations Utrecht University（9乌得勒支大学德劳内三角剖）.pdfVIP

When we talked about maps of a piece of the earth’s surface in previous chapters, we implicitly assumed there is no relief. This may be reasonable for a country like the Netherlands, but it is a bad assumption for Switzerland. In this chapter we set out to remedy this situation. We can model a piece of the earth’s surface as a terrain. A terrain is a 2-dimensional surface in 3-dimensional space with a special property: every vertical line intersects it in a point, if it intersects it at all. In other words, it is the graph of a function f : A 2 that assigns a height f p to every point p in the domain, A , of the terrain. (The earth is round, so on a global scale terrains defined in this manner are not a good model of the earth. But on a more local scale terrains provide a fairly good model.) A terrain can be visualized with a perspective drawing like the one in Figure 9.1, or with contour lines—lines of equal height—like on a topographic map. Figure 9.1 A perspective view of a terrain Of course, we don’t know the height of every point on earth; we only know it where we’ve measured it. This means that when we talk about some terrain, we only know the value of the function f at a finite set P A of sample points. From the height of the sample points we somehow have to approximate the height at the other points in the domain. A naive approach assigns to every p A the height of the nearest sample point. However, this gives a discrete terrain, which 191 Chapter 9 doesn’t look very natural. Therefore our approach for approximating a terrain DELAUNAY TRIANGULATIONS