A geometrical approach to determine the proximity of a point to an axisymmetric quadric in space

Abstract

This paper presents the classification of a general quadric into an axisymmetric quadric (AQ) and the solution to the problem of the proximity of a given point to an AQ. The problem of proximity in $R^3$ is reduced to the same in $R^2$, which is not found in the literature. A new method to solve the problem in $R^2$ is used based on the geometrical properties of the conics, such as sub-normal, length of the semi-major axis, eccentricity, slope and radius. Furthermore, the problem in $R^2$ is categorised into two and three more sub-cases for parabola and ellipse/hyperbola, respectively, depending on the location of the point, which is a novel approach as per the authors' knowledge. The proposed method is suitable for implementation in a common programming language, such as C and proved to be faster than a commercial library, namely, Bullet.