Discretized Riemannian Delaunay triangulations

Anisotropic meshes are desirable for various applications, such as the numerical solving of partial differential equations and graphics. In this paper, we introduce an algorithm to compute discrete approximations of Riemannian Voronoi diagrams on 2-manifolds. This is not straightforward because geodesics, shortest paths between points, and therefore distances cannot in general be computed exactly. Our implementation employs recent developments in the numerical computation of geodesic distances and is accelerated through the use of an underlying anisotropic graph structure. We give conditions that guarantee that our discrete Riemannian Voronoi diagram is combinatorially equivalent to the Riemannian Voronoi diagram and that its dual is an embedded triangulation, using both approximate geodesics and straight edges. Both the theoretical guarantees on the approximation of the Voronoi diagram and the implementation are new and provide a step towards the practical application of Riemannian Delaunay triangulations. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.