Delaunay Triangulations in the Hilbert Metric

The Hilbert metric is a distance function defined for points lying within the interior of a convex body. It arises in the analysis and processing of convex bodies, machine learning, and quantum information theory. In this paper, we show how to adapt the Euclidean Delaunay triangulation to the Hilbert geometry defined by a convex polygon in the plane. We analyze the geometric properties of the Hilbert Delaunay triangulation, which has some notable differences with respect to the Euclidean case, including the fact that the triangulation does not necessarily cover the convex hull of the point set. We also introduce the notion of a Hilbert ball at infinity, which is a Hilbert metric ball centered on the boundary of the convex polygon. We present a simple randomized incremental algorithm that computes the Hilbert Delaunay triangulation for a set of $n$ points in the Hilbert geometry defined by a convex $m$-gon. The algorithm runs in $O(n (\log n + \log^3 m))$ expected time. In addition we introduce the notion of the Hilbert hull of a set of points, which we define to be the region covered by their Hilbert Delaunay triangulation. We present an algorithm for computing the Hilbert hull in time $O(n h \log^2 m)$, where $h$ is the number of points on the hull's boundary.