I am currently trying to construct the area covered by a device over an operating period.
The first step in this process appears to be constructing a polygon of the covered area.
Since the pattern is not a standard shape, convex hulls overstate the covered area by jumping to the largest coverage area possible.
I have found a paper that appears to cover the concept of non-convex hull generation, but no discussions on how to implement this within a high level language.
http://www.geosensor.net/papers/duckham08.PR.pdf
Has anyone seen a straight forward algorithm for constructing a non-convex hull or concave hull or perhaps any python code to achieve the same result?
I have tried convex hulls mainly qhull, with a limited edge size with limited success.
Also I have noticed some licensed libraries that will not be able to be distributed, so unfortunately thats off the table.
Any better ideas or cookbooks?
You might try looking into Alpha Shapes. The CGAL library can compute them.
Edit: I see that the paper you linked references alpha shapes, and also has an algorithm listing. Is that not high level enough for you? Since you listed python as a tag, I’m sure there are Delaunay triangulation libraries in Python, which I think is the hardest part of implementing the algorithm; you just need to make sure you can modify the resulting triangulation output. The boundary query functions can probably be implemented with associative arrays.