INPUT OUTPUT
Problem: What is the convolution of A and B, ie. the Minkowski sum A+B = \{x+y| x\in A, y \in B\}?
Excerpt from The Algorithm Design Manual: Minkowski sums are useful geometric operations that can be used to fatten objects in appropriate ways. For example, a popular approach to motion planning for polygonal robots in a room with polygonal obstacles fattens each of the obstacles by taking the Minkowski sum of them with the shape of the robot. This reduces the problem to moving a point from the start to the goal using a standard shortest-path algorithm. Another application is in shape simplification where we fatten the boundary of an object to create a channel and then define as the shape the minimum link path lying within this channel. Similarly, convolving an irregular object with a small circle will help smooth out the boundaries by eliminating minor nicks and cuts.
Computational Geometry : Algorithms and Applications by Mark De Berg, Marc Van Kreveld, Mark Overmars, and O. Schwartskopf | Computational Geometry in C by Joseph O'Rourke |