An Experimental Evaluation of Offset Computation for Polygons

Abstract

We present an experimental evaluation of the computation of offset curves of polygons in the plane. Our evaluation involves several leading software packages for computing Boolean operations and for computing Voronoi diagrams. We compare these packages to our own codes CAPOP (for computing Boolean operations on closed curves consisting of straight-line and circular-arc edges) and Vroni (for computing Voronoi diagrams). Our extensive tests show that the differences in the run-times of the packages tested are substan-tial. In particular, only CAPOP and the Voronoi codes Vroni and OpenVoronoi exhibit a clearly sub-quadratic run-time complexity.