Delaunay triangulation in SciPy - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Delaunay triangulation

📖 Scenario: You are working with a set of points on a 2D plane, like locations on a map. You want to connect these points to form triangles so that no point is inside the circle of any triangle. This is called Delaunay triangulation and is useful in many areas like computer graphics, geography, and mesh generation.

🎯 Goal: Build a Python program that creates a set of points, configures the triangulation, performs Delaunay triangulation using scipy.spatial.Delaunay, and then prints the triangles formed by the points.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a list of 2D points with exact coordinates

Import and use scipy.spatial.Delaunay for triangulation

Store the triangulation result in a variable

Print the indices of points forming each triangle

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Delaunay triangulation is used in mapping, computer graphics, and engineering to create meshes and understand spatial relationships between points.

💼 Career

Knowing how to perform and use Delaunay triangulation is useful for data scientists working with spatial data, geographic information systems (GIS), and 3D modeling.

1

Create the points data

Create a variable called points that holds a list of these exact 2D points: [0, 0], [1, 0], [1, 1], [0, 1], and [0.5, 0.5].

SciPy

# Create the list of points
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a list of lists to store the points exactly as given.

2

Import Delaunay and prepare triangulation

Import Delaunay from scipy.spatial and create a variable called tri by passing points to Delaunay().

SciPy

points = [[0, 0], [1, 0], [1, 1], [0, 1], [0.5, 0.5]]
# Import Delaunay and create triangulation
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use from scipy.spatial import Delaunay and then tri = Delaunay(points).

3

Extract triangles from triangulation

Create a variable called triangles and set it to tri.simplices to get the indices of points forming each triangle.

SciPy

points = [[0, 0], [1, 0], [1, 1], [0, 1], [0.5, 0.5]]
from scipy.spatial import Delaunay
tri = Delaunay(points)
# Get the triangles from tri.simplices
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use triangles = tri.simplices to get the triangle indices.

4

Print the triangles

Write a print statement to display the triangles variable.

SciPy

points = [[0, 0], [1, 0], [1, 1], [0, 1], [0.5, 0.5]]
from scipy.spatial import Delaunay
tri = Delaunay(points)
triangles = tri.simplices
# Print the triangles
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print(triangles) to show the triangle indices.