Many algorithmic problems can be solved (almost) as efficiently in metric spaces of bounded doubling dimension as in Euclidean space. Unfortunately, the metric space defined by points in a simple polygon equipped with the geodesic distance does not necessarily have bounded doubling dimension. We therefore study the doubling dimension of fat polygons, for two well-known fatness definitions. We prove that locally-fat simple polygons do not always have bounded doubling dimension, while any (α,β)-covered polygon does have bounded doubling dimension (even if it has holes). We also study the perimeter of geodesically convex sets in (α,β)-covered polygons (possibly with holes), and show that this perimeter is at most a constant times the Euclidean diameter of the set. Using these two results, we obtain new results for several problems on (α,β)-covered polygons, including an algorithm that computes the closest pair of a set of m points in an (α,β)-covered polygon with n vertices that runs in O(n + mlog n) expected time.
Berg et al. (Thu,) studied this question.