Minimum Bounding Box

Minimum Bounding Box

The minimum or smallest bounding or enclosing box is a term used in geometry. For a point set in N dimensions, it refers to the box with the smallest measure (area, volume, or hypervolume in higher dimensions) within which all the points lie. When other kinds of measure are used, the minimum box is usually called accordingly, e.g., "minimum-perimeter bounding box".

The minimum bounding box of a point set is the same as the minimum bounding box of its convex hull, a fact which may be used heuristically to speed up computation.

The term "box"/"hyperrectangle" comes from its usage in the Cartesian coordinate system, where it is indeed visualized as a rectangle (two-dimensional case), rectangular parallelepiped (three-dimensional case), etc.

In the two-dimensional case it is called the minimum bounding rectangle.

Read more about Minimum Bounding Box:  Axis-aligned Minimum Bounding Box, Arbitrarily Oriented Minimum Bounding Box, Digital Image Processing

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