Efficiently determining a locally exact shortest path on polyhedral surfaces

In this paper, we present an efficient visibility-based algorithm for determining a locally exact shortest path (LESP) from a source point to a destination point on a (triangulated) polyhedral surface. Our algorithm, of a finitely-iterative scheme, evolves an initial approximately shortest path into a LESP. During each iteration, we first compute the exact shortest path restricted on the current face sequence according to Fermat’s principle which affirms that light always follows the shortest optical path, and then optimize the face sequence where the path is not locally shortest on the polyhedral surface. Since the series of paths we obtained are monotonic decreasing in length, the algorithm gives a LESP which is shorter than the initial path, at conclusion. For comparison, we use various methods to provide an initial path. One of the methods is Dijkstra’s algorithm, and the others are the Fast Marching Method (FMM) and its improved version. Our intention for improvement is to overcome the limitation of acute triangulations in the original version. To achieve this goal, we classify all the edges into seven types according to different wavefront propagation manners, and dynamically determine the type of each edge for controlling the subsequent wavefront expansion. Furthermore, we give two approaches for backtracing the approximately shortest paths directed at the improved FMM. One exploits the known propagation manners of the edges as well as the Euler’s method. This is another contribution in this paper. c © 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.