Calculate minimum area rectangle for a polygon

Question

I have a need to calculate the minimum area rectangle (smallest possible rectangle) around the polygon.

The only input i have is the number of points in polygon.

I have the co-ordinates of the points also.

Answer 1

This is called Minimum Bounding Box, it's most basic algorithm used in OCR packages. You can find an implementation using Rotating Calipers from the OpenCV package. Once you get the source code, check out this file,

cv/src/cvrotcalipers.cpp

The method you need is cvMinAreaRect2().