Voronoi Diagram in the Laguerre Geometry and Its Applications

We extend the concept of Voronoi diagram in the ordinary Euclidean geometry for n points to the one in the Laguerre geometry for n circles in the plane, where the distance between a circle and a point is defined by the length of the tangent line, and show that there is an O(nlog n) algorithm for this extended case. The Voronoi diagram in the Laguerre geometry may be applied to solving effectively a number of geometrical problems such as those of determining whether or not a point belongs to the union of n circles, of finding the connected components of n circles, and of finding the contour of the union of n circles. As in the case with ordinary Voronoi diagrams, the algorithms proposed here for those problems are optimal to within a constant factor. Some extensions of the problem and the algorithm from different viewpoints are also suggested.