A spherical point location algorithm based on barycentric coordinates

Abstract

An algorithm based on barycentric coordinates is presented to solve the point location problem in spherical triangulation meshes. During the preprocessing stage, a subdivision connectivity mesh is constructed to partition the spherical domain into some subdivision regions. Then we find a representation triangle from the triangle set of original spherical mesh for each subdivision region. During the locating stage, we firstly find the subdivision region containing the query point p and select the corresponding representation triangle as the start one to walk. Then the barycentric coordinates are used to extract local heuristic information about the location of p, so as to find the shortest path from the start triangle to the target one. In comparison with traditional algorithms, our approach has better time-space performance. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.