Circular Separability of Polygons

Two planar sets are circularly separable if there exists a circle enclosing one of the sets and whose open interior disk does not intersect the other set. This paper studies two problems related to circular separability. A linear-time algorithm is proposed to decide if two polygons are circularly separable. The algorithm outputs the smallest separating circle. The second problem asks for the largest circle included in a preprocessed, convex polygon, under some point and/ or line constraints. The resulting circle must contain the query points and it must lie in the halfplanes delimited by the query lines. Received October 25, 1998; revised April 21, 1999.