Generalizing halfspaces

Eugene Fink and Derick Wood

In Proceedings of the Eighth Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry, pages 211-216, 1996.

Abstract

Restricted-orientation convexity is the study of geometric objects whose intersection with lines from some fixed set is empty or connected. We have studied the properties of restricted-orientation convex sets and demonstrated that this notion is a generalization of standard convexity. We now describe a restricted-orientation generalization of halfspaces and explore properties of these generalized halfspaces. In particular, we establish analogs of the following properties of standard halfspaces:

• The intersection of a halfspace with every line is empty, a ray, or a line
• Every halfspace is convex
• A closed set with nonempty interior and convex boundary is a halfspace
• The closure of the complement of a halfspace is a halfspace