Geodetic bounding circle algorithm

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
java
Domain
backend

Research direction

Start by examining JTS's Euclidean bounding-circle algorithm and the geodetic constraints described in the issue. Define the expected centroid and smallest enclosing radius for points on a sphere, then identify suitable entry points and tests in Spatial4j. Done should include an agreed algorithm, documented behavior, and coverage for representative spherical point sets.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

InternIdea

Given a set of points on the surface of a sphere, what is the centroid and smallest radius that encompasses them? Answering this is useful for getting a circle approximation of a shape, useful potentially for subsequently computing shape overlap similarity (relevancy/ranking metric). And it could be used to compute a polygon center, which then might be used to locally-project the data to then do other things.

For inspiration, we could examine JTS's Euclidean algorithm, and adapt it to work geodetically. I worked a concept of this out on paper.

Dominant language
Java
Stars
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Forks
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