Voronoi Diagram for Convex Polygonal Sites with Convex Polygon-Offset Distance Function

The concept of convex polygon-offset distance function was introduced in 2001 by Barequet, Dickerson, and Goodrich. Using this notion of point-to-point distance, they showed how to compute the corresponding nearestand farthest-site Voronoi diagram for a set of points. In this paper we generalize the polygon-offset distance function to be from a point to any convex object with respect to an m-sided convex polygon, and study the nearestand farthest-site Voronoi diagrams for sets of line segments and convex polygons. We show that the combinatorial complexity of the nearest-site Voronoi diagram of n disjoint line segments is O(nm), which is asymptotically equal to that of the Voronoi diagram of n point sites with respect to the same distance function. In addition, we generalize this result to the Voronoi diagram of disjoint convex polygonal sites. We show that the combinatorial complexity of the nearest-site Voronoi diagram of n convex polygonal sites, each having at most k sides, is O(n(m + k)). Finally, we show that the corresponding farthest-site Voronoi diagram is a tree-like structure with the same combinatorial complexity.