Computational Geometry Algorithms Library
The Computational Geometry Algorithms Library (CGAL) is an international open source software project and the corresponding C++ library that implements algoritms in computational geometry. [1]
The sofrware is available under dual licensing scheme. When used for other open source software, it is available under Open Source Licenses. In other cases commercial license may be purchased, under different options for academic/research and industrial customers.[2]
History
The project started in 1996 as the pooling of the previous efforts of several project participants:PlaGeo and SpaGeo from Utrecht University, LEDA of the Max-Planck-Institute and C++GAL of INRIA Sophia-Antipolis. Other initial participants were ETH Zurich, Free University of Berlin, Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, Research Institute for Symbolic Computation of the Johannes Kepler University Linz, and Tel-Aviv University.
Initially the project offered the academic license, which allowed free use for the academia. The current licensing scheme was introduced in 2003.
The project has been funded by the EU program Esprit, with some additional funding.
Scope
The library covers the following topics
- Geometry kernels - basic geometric operations on geometric primitives
- Arithmetic and algebra
- Convex hull algorithms
- Polygons and polyhedra
- Polygon and polyhedron operations
- Arrangements
- Triangulations
- Voronoi diagrams
- Mesh generation
- Geometry processing
- Search structures
- Shape analysis, fitting, and distances
- Interpolation
- Kinetic data structures
Platforms
The library is supported on a number of platforms.
- MS Windows (GNU g++, MS Visual C++, Intel C++)
- GNU g++ (Solaris, Linux, Mac OS
The CGAL library depends on the Boost library.