Delaunay has shown that the Delaunay complex of a finite set of points P of Euclidean space R m triangulates the convex hull of P , provided that P satisfies a mild genericity property. Voronoi diagrams and Delaunay complexes can be defined for arbitrary Riemannian manifolds. However, Delaunay's genericity assumption no longer guarantees that the Delaunay complex will yield a triangulation; stronger assumptions on P are required. A natural one is to assume that P is sufficiently dense. Although results in this direction have been claimed, we show that sample density alone is insufficient to ensure that the Delaunay complex triangulates a manifold of dimension greater than 2.
Delaunay complex and Delaunay triangulationLet (M, d M ) be a metric space, and let P be a finite set of points of M. An empty ball is an open ball in the metric d M that contains no point from P . We say that an empty ball B is maximal if no other empty ball with the same centre properly contains B. A Delaunay ball is a maximal empty ball.A simplex σ is a Delaunay simplex if there exists some Delaunay ball B that circumscribes σ, i.e., such that the vertices of σ belong to ∂B ∩ P . The Delaunay complex is the set of Delaunay simplices, and is denoted Del M (P ). It is an abstract simplicial complex and so defines a topological space, |Del M (P )|, called its carrier . We say that DelThe Voronoi cell associated with p ∈ P is given byMore generally, a Voronoi face is the intersection of a set of Voronoi cells: given σ = {p 0 , . . . , p k } ⊂ P , we define the associated Voronoi face asIt follows that σ is a Delaunay simplex if and only if V M (σ) = ∅. In this case, every point in V M (σ) is the centre of a Delaunay ball for σ. Thus every Voronoi face corresponds to a Delaunay