dhw@itivax.UUCP (David H. West) (11/09/88)
Has anyone seen a discussion of how best to perform simple geometric
operations on a spherical surface? The kinds of thing I have in
mind are: calculate the intersection of two great-circle segments,
the incenter of a spherical triangle, and whether a point is inside
a spherical polygon. All I've been able to find is how to
solve spherical triangles, which is probably not the best way to do
anything efficiently - it seems to me that there is probably a way
(e.g. using direction cosines) to consistently avoid most of the trig
function evaluations.
Has anyone seen a good way to partition a spherical surface to
support nearest-neighbor search? Subtriangulating a regular
polyhedron seems reasonable, except for generating neighbors of a
partition. (Somebody must have invented this wheel...)
Please email, I'll summarize if there are both interest and answers.
-David West dhw%iti@umix.cc.umich.edu
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CDSL, Industrial Technology Institute, PO Box 1485,
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