Section: New Results

Intersection Detection via Gauss Maps; a Review and New Techniques

Participant : Samuel Hornus.

We have revisited the problem of deciding whether two convex objects intersect or not. A systematic view of the problem for polyhedra led us to a unified view of several techniques developed in the computer graphics community and to a new and very fast technique specialized to pairs of tetrahedra. A novel view of the problem as a minimization problem over the 2-sphere led us to the description of new interesting links between the set of planes separating two objects and the silhouette edges of their Minkowski difference. From there, we devised a new algorithm for separating two arbitrary convex objects that is a little bit faster and much more robust than the state of the art technique of Gilbert, Johnson and Keerthi  [31] . The work has been summarized in [21] .