Given a DCEL, how do you identify the unbounded face

Question

I have constructed a DCEL using the procedure described in How do I construct a doubly connected edge list given a set of line segments?.

This correctly identifies all faces, however I'm struggling to come up with a way to identify the unbounded face surrounding my graph.

So far my only idea is that by building a polygonal representation of every face, I could find the face polygon which 'contains' all the others, but this seems kind of messy.

Narek Bojikian · Accepted Answer · 2021-01-12T19:31:02.847

3

Take any extreme vertex (say among the vertices having the minimum x-coordinate, the one that minimizes y). This vertex is incident to two edges touching the outer face. Namely the first and the last half-edges leaving this vertex. The first one has the outer face on its right and the last one on its left.

edited Jan 12 '21 at 19:31

answered Oct 31 '19 at 09:30

Narek Bojikian

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Won't have the opportunity to try this until later, but that sounds right! Thank you! – Alistair401 Oct 31 '19 at 10:23

Given a DCEL, how do you identify the unbounded face

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