The hierarchical representation of objects: the Delaunay tree

We present, in this paper, a new hierarchical data structure called the Delaunay tree. It is defined from the Delaunay triangulation and, roughly speaking, represents a triangulation as a hierarchy of balls. The Delaunay tree provides efficient solutions to several problems such as building the Delaunay triangulation of a finite set of n points in any dimension, locating a point in the triangulation, defining neighborhood relationships in the triangulation and computing intersections. The algorithms are extremely simple and are analyzed from a theoretical and practical points of view.