A streaming, certificate-based reduction for convex hull preservation in planar point sets.

Cadenas, Oswaldo · PLoS One · 2026

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Abstract

Convex hull computation on large planar point sets is commonly preceded by geometric filtering to reduce input size. Motivated by invariants used in incremental convex hull maintenance, we derive a streaming, certificate-based reduction that discards only points certified interior to the hull. We show that the reduction preserves the exact convex hull and operates in a single streaming pass with only local geometric operations. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate substantial reduction, retaining between 5% and 11% of input points on average for synthetic distributions and below 1% on large real-world data under typical arrival order.

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