I realise that Voronoi diagrams have their own (many) uses, and that you cannot talk about your work application, but...is there any way that you can describe or analogise an application for deriving a single encompassing polygon from a set of points?

I'm having trouble envisaging the application that starts with a set of points, needs to construct a single polygon that "encompasses" them all, and for which the simplest or best mechanism is to go through the construction of a voronoi diagram and then coalesce the polygons.

I worked on an application years ago, something to do with x-ray microscopy, that given a very large set of points needed to calculate the smallest area that encompassed all the points. That too did not want a convex hull solution. I'm trying to remember the details (and name) of the algorithm we ended up using, but I remember that it was fairly simple and very much faster than the first couple of attempts. And it definitely didn't calculate a voronoi diagram at any stage. I think it used vector math?

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In reply to Re: Better maps with Math::Geometry::Voronoi, and a Challenge for Math Monks by BrowserUk
in thread Better maps with Math::Geometry::Voronoi, and a Challenge for Math Monks by samtregar

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