Region-expansion for the Voronoi diagram of 3D spheres

Given a set of spheres in 3D, constructing its Voronoi diagram in Euclidean distance metric is not easy at all even though many mathematical properties of its structure are known. This Voronoi diagram has been known for many important applications from science and engineering. In this paper, we characterize the Voronoi diagram of spheres in three-dimensional Euclidean space, which is also known as an additively weighted Voronoi diagram, and propose an algorithm to construct the diagram. Starting with the ordinary Voronoi diagram of the centers of the spheres, the proposed region-expansion algorithm constructs the desired diagram by expanding the Voronoi region of each sphere, one after another. We also show that the whole Voronoi diagram of n spheres can be constructed in 0(n(3)) time in the worst case. (C) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.