Geometric Tools for Computer Graphics

CHAPTER 6 DISTANCE IN 2D

This chapter contains information on computing distance between geometric primitives in 2D. An application might not want to pay the price for an expensive square root calculation, so many of the algorithms in this chapter provide a construction for squared distance. Of course, fundamental to any distance algorithm is the squared distance between two points X = (x₀, x₁) and Y = (y₀,y₁)

     (6.1)

We will discuss algorithms for computing the distance between a point and another object first; other combinations are discussed later in the chapter. When both objects are convex with polyline or polygonal boundaries, including ...