Optimal Transport and Tessellation

Abstract

Optimal transport from the volume measure to a convex combination of Dirac measures yields a tessellation of a Riemannian manifold into pieces of arbitrary relative size. This tessellation is studied for the cost functions $c_p(z,y)=\frac{1}{p}d^p(z,y)$ and $1\leq p<\infty$. Geometric descriptions of the tessellations for all $p$ is obtained for compact subsets of the Euclidean space. For $p=2$ this approach yields Laguerre tessellations. For $p=1$ it induces Johnson Mehl diagrams for all compact Riemannian manifolds.

corrected version, Theorem 2 appears in slightly different form in arXiv:1206.3672