Computing The Distance To A Convex Hull

I am using the ConvexHull class of scipy to construct a convex hull for a set of points. I am interested in a way to compute the minimum distance of a new point P from the convex h

Solution 1:

if the points of the convex hull are given as a NX2 array and the point is given as p=[x,y]

import math
#from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/849211/shortest-distance-between-a-point-and-a-line-segment
def dist(x1,y1, x2,y2, x3,y3): # x3,y3 is the point
    px = x2-x1
    py = y2-y1

    something = px*px + py*py

    u =  ((x3 - x1) * px + (y3 - y1) * py) / float(something)

    if u > 1:
        u = 1
    elif u < 0:
        u = 0

    x = x1 + u * px
    y = y1 + u * py

    dx = x - x3
    dy = y - y3

    # Note: If the actual distance does not matter,
    # if you only want to compare what this function
    # returns to other results of this function, you
    # can just return the squared distance instead
    # (i.e. remove the sqrt) to gain a little performance

    dist = math.sqrt(dx*dx + dy*dy)

    return dist

dists=[]
for i in range(len(points)-1):
    dists.append(dist(points[i][0],points[i][1],points[i+1][0],points[i+1][1],p[0],p[1]))
dist = min(dists)