The Orthant Neighborhood Graph: A Decentralized Spatial Data Structure for Dynamic Point Sets

This work presents a novel approach for proximity queries in dynamic point sets, a common problem in computer graphics. We introduce the notion of Orthant Neighborhood Graphs, yielding a simple, decentralized spatial data structure based on weak spanners. We present efficient algorithms for dynamic insertions, deletions and movements of points, as well as range searching and other proximity queries. All our algorithms work in the local neighborhood of given points and are therefore independent of the global point set. This makes ONGs scalable to large point sets, where the total number of points does not influence local operations.