Need to triangulate points on a sphere? This paper introduces STRIPACK, a Fortran 77 software package that constructs a Delaunay triangulation and Voronoi diagram for a set of points on the surface of a unit sphere. Covering the convex hull, the triangulation allows nodal additions or deletions, while the Voronoi diagram covers the whole surface. The package efficiently updates the triangulation as new nodes are added or removed. For a set of \(N\) nodes, the triangulation requires \(13N\) integer storage locations in addition to \(3N\) nodal coordinates. Using an off-line algorithm and work space of size \(3N\), the triangulation can be constructed with a time complexity of \(O(NlogN)\). STRIPACK provides researchers and practitioners with a robust and efficient tool for performing Delaunay triangulations on the sphere, which has applications in various fields, including computer graphics, geographic information systems, and computational geometry. Its ability to handle nodal additions and deletions makes it suitable for dynamic applications where the point set changes over time.
This article, published in ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software, is relevant to the journal's focus on computer software and mathematical algorithms. The introduction of STRIPACK, a software package for Delaunay triangulation on the sphere, directly aligns with the journal's scope. The article provides a detailed description of the algorithm, its implementation, and its computational complexity, making it a valuable resource for software developers and researchers in related fields.