The Closest and Farthest Points to an Affine Ellipse or Ellipsoid

Affine ellipses/ellipsoids based bounding volumes are widely used in various graphics applications,such as ray tracing and collision detection.They provide a much tighter fit than the regular ellipses/ellipsoids.The most important operation involved is to compute the closest/farthest point,on a given ellipse/ellipsoid,with respect to a user specified point.In this paper,we first formulate such a problem for the ellipse case into solving a quartic equation and then for the ellipsoid case by solving a system of quartic equations.The method proposed in this paper is elegant and highly efficient.