Question

I’m trying to determine if a point is inside a polygon. the Polygon is defined by an array of Point objects. I can easily figure out if the point is inside the bounded box of the polygon, but I’m not sure how to tell if it’s inside the actual polygon or not. If possible, I’d like to only use C# and WinForms. I’d rather not call on OpenGL or something to do this simple task.

Here’s the code I have so far:

private void CalculateOuterBounds()
{
    //m_aptVertices is a Point[] which holds the vertices of the polygon.
    // and X/Y min/max are just ints
    Xmin = Xmax = m_aptVertices[0].X;
    Ymin = Ymax = m_aptVertices[0].Y;

    foreach(Point pt in m_aptVertices)
    {
        if(Xmin > pt.X)
            Xmin = pt.X;

        if(Xmax < pt.X)
            Xmax = pt.X;

        if(Ymin > pt.Y)
            Ymin = pt.Y;

        if(Ymax < pt.Y)
            Ymax = pt.Y;
    }
}

public bool Contains(Point pt)
{
    bool bContains = true; //obviously wrong at the moment :)

    if(pt.X < Xmin || pt.X > Xmax || pt.Y < Ymin || pt.Y > Ymax)
        bContains = false;
    else
    {
        //figure out if the point is in the polygon
    }

    return bContains;
}

Answer 1

See this it’s in c++ and can be done in c# in a same way.

for convex polygon is too easy:

If the polygon is convex then one can
consider the polygon as a “path” from
the first vertex. A point is on the
interior of this polygons if it is
always on the same side of all the
line segments making up the path.

Given a line segment between P0
(x0,y0) and P1 (x1,y1), another point
P (x,y) has the following relationship
to the line segment. Compute (y – y0)
(x1 – x0) – (x – x0) (y1 – y0)

if it is less than 0 then P is to the
right of the line segment, if greater
than 0 it is to the left, if equal to
0 then it lies on the line segment.

Here is its code in c#, I didn’t check edge cases.

        public static bool IsInPolygon(Point[] poly, Point point)
        {
           var coef = poly.Skip(1).Select((p, i) => 
                                           (point.Y - poly[i].Y)*(p.X - poly[i].X) 
                                         - (point.X - poly[i].X) * (p.Y - poly[i].Y))
                                   .ToList();

            if (coef.Any(p => p == 0))
                return true;

            for (int i = 1; i < coef.Count(); i++)
            {
                if (coef[i] * coef[i - 1] < 0)
                    return false;
            }
            return true;
        }

I test it with simple rectangle works fine:

            Point[] pts = new Point[] { new Point { X = 1, Y = 1 }, 
                                        new Point { X = 1, Y = 3 }, 
                                        new Point { X = 3, Y = 3 }, 
                                        new Point { X = 3, Y = 1 } };
            IsInPolygon(pts, new Point { X = 2, Y = 2 }); ==> true
            IsInPolygon(pts, new Point { X = 1, Y = 2 }); ==> true
            IsInPolygon(pts, new Point { X = 0, Y = 2 }); ==> false

Explanation on the linq query:

poly.Skip(1) ==> creates a new list started from position 1 of the poly list and then by
(point.Y - poly[i].Y)*(p.X - poly[i].X) - (point.X - poly[i].X) * (p.Y - poly[i].Y) we’ll going to calculate the direction (which mentioned in referenced paragraph).
similar example (with another operation):

lst = 2,4,8,12,7,19
lst.Skip(1) ==> 4,8,12,7,19
lst.Skip(1).Select((p,i)=>p-lst[i]) ==> 2,4,4,-5,12