International Journal of CAD/CAM

Society for Computational Design and Engineering (한국CDE학회)
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Unifying Method for Computing the Circumcircles of Three Circles

  • Published : 2002.12.31
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Abstract

Given a set of three generator circles in a plane, we want to find a circumcircle of these generators. This problem is a part of well-known Apollonius' $10^{th}$ Problem and is frequently encountered in various geometric computations such as the Voronoi diagram for circles. It turns out that this seemingly trivial problem is not at all easy to solve in a general setting. In addition, there can be several degenerate configurations of the generators. For example, there may not exist any circumcircle, or there could be one or two circumcircle(s) depending on the generator configuration. Sometimes, a circumcircle itself may degenerate to a line. We show that the problem can be reduced to a point location problem among the regions bounded by two lines and two transformed circles via $M{\ddot{o}}bius$ transformations in a complex space. The presented algorithm is simple and the required computation is negligible. In addition, several degenerate cases are all incorporated into a unified framework.

Keywords

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