A pointy triangle could be idealized as an edge, the resulting circle will always be bigger than a bounding box.

Indeed. Any particularly flat (in either Cartesian direction) ploygon is going to be better suited to a bounding box. Whether these are plentiful or rare in the data set is only something which the OP can answer.

You might now claim that something like a regular octagon is better represented by a circle (probably).

I'd claim that not only is any regular polygon with n>4 better represented by a circle, the circle is trivially easy to compute. If the data set were all regular polygons (and I'm not assuming for one minute that they are in this case) then circles would be the obvious choice.

A little domain knowledge here would help to inform the choice of bounding box or circle. Horses for courses.

In reply to Re^5: searching polygons not merged by hippo
in thread searching polygons not merged by dideod.yang

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.