kwc-lineclip

A small javascript lib for clipping polylines by a bounding box.

API

lineclip(
    [[-10, 10], [10, 10], [10, -10]], // polyline
    [0, 0, 20, 20]); // bbox
// returns [[[0, 10], [10, 10], [10, 0]]]

Algorithm

This library is an implementation of the approach described in 'An Efficient Algorithm for Line Clipping in Computer Graphics Programming' by Kodituwakka, Wijeweera & Chamikara. Some adjustments have been made to the algorithm in the paper to cater for lines with multiple segments.

Performance

I've checked the performance of this algorithm against implementations of the Cohen-Sutherland and a Liang-barsky algorithms for clipping just one segment. Liang-barsky currently only supports a single segment clip.

SINGLE SEGMENT TEST
kwc x 9,542,273 ops/sec ±1.78% (100 runs sampled)
liang-barsky (non-destructive) x 17,583,416 ops/sec ±2.89% (99 runs sampled)
mapbox/lineclip x 7,022,569 ops/sec ±8.14% (95 runs sampled)
- Fastest is liang-barsky (non-destructive)

MULTIPLE SEGMENT MULTIPLE OUTPUT TEST
kwc x 4,974,886 ops/sec ±6.84% (82 runs sampled)
mapbox/lineclip x 3,788,980 ops/sec ±0.70% (88 runs sampled)
- Fastest is kwc

LONGER LINE
kwc x 800,189 ops/sec ±0.79% (93 runs sampled)
mapbox/lineclip x 704,052 ops/sec ±2.53% (88 runs sampled)
- Fastest is kwc

kwc-lineclip was initially faster than liang-barsky until I amended the algorithm to support multiple segments.

Memory usage is also slightly less in with this module compared with lineclip.