CGAL 4.6 beta1 released

Changelog

Installation

• The required version of Boost is now 1.48 or higher.

2D Polyline Simplification (new package)

• This package enables to simplify polylines with the guarantee that the topology of the polylines does not change. This can be done for a single polyline as well as for a set of polyline constraints in a constrained triangulation. The simplification can be controlled with cost and stop functions.

2D Generalized Barycentric Coordinates (new package)

• This package offers an efficient and robust implementation of two-dimensional closed-form generalized barycentric coordinates defined for simple two-dimensional polygons.

Scale-Space Surface Reconstruction (new package)

• This new package provides a class gathering a dedicated smoothing algorithm and some convenience functions to help the creation of a surface out of a point set using the 3D Alpha Shapes package. The particularity of this reconstruction pipeline is that the input point are in the output and no new points are created. Note that in the current version, the output is a triangle soup that is not necessarily a valid (manifold) polyhedral surface.

Surface Mesh (new package)

• The surface mesh class provided by this package is an implementation of the halfedge data structure allowing to represent polyhedral surfaces. It is an alternative to the packages CGAL::Polyhedron_3 and CGAL::HalfedgeDS.

dD Triangulation (new package)

• This new package provides classes for manipulating triangulations in Euclidean spaces whose dimension can be specified at compile-time or at run-time. It also provides a class that represents Delaunay triangulations.

dD Convex Hulls and Delaunay Triangulations

• This package is deprecated and the new package Triangulation should be used instead.

dD Geometry Kernel

• It has been reported that the recently introduced Epick_d kernel may not work with Intel C++ Compiler prior to version 15. Documentation has been updated.

3D Convex Hulls

• Added functions halfspace_intersection_3 and halfspace_intersection_with_constructions_3 to compute the intersection of halfspaces defining a closed polyhedron.
• Fixed a bug introduced in CGAL 4.5 that can appear while computing the convex hull of coplanar points.
• Fixed a robustness issue in Convex_hull_traits_3. This traits is used by default with the kernel Exact_predicates_inexact_constructions_kernel.

Combinatorial Maps and Linear Cell Complex

• Added correct_invalid_attributes, set_automatic_attributes_management and are_attributes_automatically_managed methods in CombinatorialMap concept. This allows high level operations to not update non void attributes during massive calls of these operations, but only after the end of their executions.

2D Triangulations

• The class Constrained_triangulation_plus_2 now can handle polylines as constraints.
• As a consequence a Constraint_id has been introduced which replaces pair<Vertex_handle,Vertex_handle> as identifier of a constraint.

3D Mesh Generation

• Added member functions output_boundary_to_off and output_facets_in_complex_to_off in the class CGAL::Mesh_complex_3_in_triangulation_3 to export the boundary of a domain or a subdomain.

3D Fast Intersection and Distance Computation

• Added new constructors to AABB_halfedge_graph_segment_primitive and AABB_face_graph_triangle_primitive in order to be able to build primitives one by one.

Spatial Searching

• Fixed a bug in CGAL::Splitters.h sliding midpoint rule, where degenerated point sets (e.g.,points on segment) caused the kd-tree to get linear.
• Improved performance of Orthogonal_k_neighbor_search. Note that VC 2013 does not compile boost::container::deque of Boost 1_55 and does hence have a workaround which does not have the improvement.
• Breaking change: The concept OrthogonalDistance has new function overloads for min_distance_to_rectangle and max_distance_to_rectangle with an additional reference parameter std::vector.
• Breaking change: The order of the points in the iterator range [tree.begin(),tree.end()] is not the order of insertion of the points into the tree. This was not guaranteed before but might have been observed and exploited by users.
• Derived kd_tree_leaf_node and kd_tree_internal_node from kd_tree_node to save memory.

Geometric Object Generators

• Added a new function random_convex_hull_in_disc_2 that efficiently generates a random polygon as the convex hull of uniform random points chosen in a disc.