Summary: Straight Skeletons
for General Polygonal Figures
in the Plane
OSWIN AICHHOLZER
FRANZ AURENHAMMER
Institute for Theoretical Computer Science
Graz University of Technology
Klosterwiesgasse 32/2, A­8010 Graz, Austria
foaich,aureng@igi.tu­graz.ac.at
1 Introduction
A planar straight line graph, G, on n points in the Euclidean plane is a set
of non­crossing line segments spanned by these points. A skeleton of G is a
partition of the plane into faces that reflect the shape of G in an appropriate
manner. The well­known and widely used examples of skeletons are the medial
axis of a simple polygon or, more generally, the (closest­point) Voronoi diagram
of G. Skeletons have numerous applications, for example in biology, geography,
pattern recognition, robotics, and computer graphics; see e.g. [Ki, L, Y] for a
short history.
The Voronoi diagram of G consists of all points in the plane which have more
than one closest object in G. Typically, it contains curved arcs in the neighbor­

Source: Aurenhammer, Franz - Institute for Theoretical Computer Science, Technische Universität Graz
Technische Universität Graz, Institute for Software Technology

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences