On Automatic Computation of Minimum-Area Encasing Rectangles of Arbitrary Polygons

The minimum area encasing rectangle (MAER) of an arbitrary polygon is an important tool in the communities of document recognition, geographic information systems and image retrieval. However, how to calculate MAER precisely is of great difficulty. This paper firstly proves that the MAER of an arbitrary polygon shares a common edge with the convex hull of the polygon. Secondly, an algorithm for computing MAER has been presented and the efficiency of the algorithm has been discussed. Finally, some experiments are given to show the feasibility and reliability of the algorithm.