Collision Detection using Polar Diagrams

Lidia Ortega
University of Jaén
Department of "Informática"
23071 & Jaén
Spain

e-mail:lidia@ujaen.es

http://wwwdi.ujaen.es/~lidia/

Abstract

In Computer Graphics, Collision Detection is considered a key problem with important applications in related areas. Several solutions have been proposed, but independently of the chosen strategy, different stages of the solution are considered. It is not only relevant to apply a good static collision test, reducing the pairs of objects susceptible of intersecting is important in order to obtain suitable computation times. Some methods achieve this aim computing a tessellation as preprocessing. The new approach we propose in this paper computes a partition of the plane with similar features to those of the Voronoi Diagram, but changing the Euclidean distance criterion for the minimal polar angle. The result is a new tessellation called Polar Diagram, in which every object in the scene is owner of a polar region as the locus of points with some common angle properties. Polar diagrams used as preprocessing can be applied to Collision Detection and many other geometric problems where the solution is given by angle processing