Merging and splitting overlapping rectangles to produce non-overlapping ones

Posted by uj on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by uj
Published on 2010-05-02T23:36:47Z Indexed on 2010/05/02 23:58 UTC
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Filed under:

algorithms

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rectangles

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computer-graphics

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mathematical-optimization

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computational-geometry

I am looking for an algorithm as follows:

Given a set of possibly overlapping rectangles (All of which are "not rotated", can be uniformly represented as (left,top,right,bottom) tuplets, etc...), it returns a minimal set of (non-rotated) non-overlapping rectangles, that occupy the same area.

It seems simple enough at first glance, but prooves to be tricky (at least to be done efficiently).

Are there some known methods for this/ideas/pointers?

Methods for not necessarily minimal, but heuristicly small, sets, are interesting as well, so are methods that produce any valid output set at all.

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