Journal of Computational Mathematics.
2004, 22(2):
299-308.
The Delaunay triangulation, in both classic and more generalized sense, is studied in
this paper for minimizing the linear interpolation error (measure in $L^p$-norm) for a given
function. The classic Delaunay triangulation can then be characterized as an optimal
triangulation that minimizes the interpolation error for the isotropic function $||x||^2$ among
all the triangulations with a given set of vertices. For a more general function, a function-
dependent Delaunay triangulation is then defined to be an optimal triangulation that
minimizes the interpolation error for this function and its construction can be obtained by
a simple lifting and projection procedure. The optimal Delaunay triangulation is the one that minimizes the interpolation error
among all triangulations with the same number of vertices, i.e. the distribution of vertices
are optimized in order to minimize the interpolation error. Such a function- dependent
optimal Delaunay triangulation is proved to exist for any given convex continuous function.
On an optimal Delaunay triangulation associated with f, it is proved that $\nabla f$ at the
interior vertices can be exactly recovered by the function values on its neighboring vertices.
Since the optimal Delaunay triangulation is difficult to obtain in practice, the concept of
nearly optimal triangulation is introduced and two sufficient conditions are presented for
a triangulation to be nearly optimal.