,
Nicolau Oliver
,
Evanthia Papadopoulou
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Given a set S of n colored sites, each s ∈ S associated with a distance-to-site function δ_s : ℝ² → ℝ, we consider two distance-to-color functions for each color: one takes the minimum of δ_s for sites s ∈ S in that color and the other takes the maximum. These two sets of distance functions induce two families of higher-order Voronoi diagrams for colors in the plane, namely, the minimal and maximal order-k color Voronoi diagrams, which include various well-studied Voronoi diagrams as special cases. In this paper, we derive an exact upper bound 4k(n-k)-2n on the total number of vertices in both the minimal and maximal order-k color diagrams for a wide class of distance functions δ_s that satisfy certain conditions, including the case of point sites S under convex distance functions and the L_p metric for any 1 ≤ p ≤ ∞. For the L_1 (or, L_∞) metric, and other convex polygonal metrics, we show that the order-k minimal diagram of point sites has O(min{k(n-k), (n-k)²}) complexity, while its maximal counterpart has O(min{k(n-k), k²}) complexity. To obtain these combinatorial results, we extend the Clarkson-Shor framework to colored objects, and demonstrate its application to several fundamental geometric structures, including higher-order color Voronoi diagrams, colored j-facets, and levels in the arrangements of piecewise linear/algebraic curves/surfaces. We also present iterative algorithms to compute higher-order color Voronoi diagrams.
@InProceedings{bae_et_al:LIPIcs.SoCG.2025.12,
author = {Bae, Sang Won and Oliver, Nicolau and Papadopoulou, Evanthia},
title = {{Higher-Order Color Voronoi Diagrams and the Colorful Clarkson-Shor Framework}},
booktitle = {41st International Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG 2025)},
pages = {12:1--12:19},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-370-6},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2025},
volume = {332},
editor = {Aichholzer, Oswin and Wang, Haitao},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.SoCG.2025.12},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-231647},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.SoCG.2025.12},
annote = {Keywords: higher-order Voronoi diagrams, color Voronoi diagrams, Hausdorff Voronoi diagrams, colored j-facets, arrangements, Clarkson-Shor technique}
}