find if 4 points on a plane form a rectangle?

Question

Can somebody please show me in C-style pseudocode how to write a function (represent the points however you like) that returns true if 4-points (args to the function) form a rectangle, and false otherwise?

I came up with a solution that first tries to find 2 distinct pairs of points with equal x-value, then does this for the y-axis. But the code is rather long. Just curious to see what others come up with.

Answer 1

1. Find all possible distances between given 4 points. (we will have 6 distances)
2. XOR all distances found in step #1
3. If the result after XORing is 0 then given 4 points are definitely vertices of a square or a rectangle otherwise, return false (given 4 points do not form a rectangle).
4. Now, to differentiate between square and rectangle 
   a. Find the largest distance out of 4 distances found in step #1. 
   b. Check if the largest distance / Math.sqrt (2) is equal to any other distance.
   c. If answer is No, then given four points form a rectangle otherwise they form a square.

Here, we are using geometric properties of rectangle/square and Bit Magic.

Rectangle properties in play

1. Opposite sides and diagonals of a rectangle are of equal length.
2. If the diagonal length of a rectangle is sqrt(2) times any of its length, then the rectangle is a square.

Bit Magic

1. XORing equal value numbers return 0.

Since distances between 4 corners of a rectangle will always form 3 pairs, one for diagonal and two for each side of different length, XORing all the values will return 0 for a rectangle.

Answer 2

The distance from one point to the other 3 should form a right triangle:

|   /      /|
|  /      / |
| /      /  |
|/___   /___|

d1 = sqrt( (x2-x1)^2 + (y2-y1)^2 ) 
d2 = sqrt( (x3-x1)^2 + (y3-y1)^2 ) 
d3 = sqrt( (x4-x1)^2 + (y4-y1)^2 ) 
if d1^2 == d2^2 + d3^2 then it's a rectangle

Simplifying:

d1 = (x2-x1)^2 + (y2-y1)^2
d2 = (x3-x1)^2 + (y3-y1)^2
d3 = (x4-x1)^2 + (y4-y1)^2
if d1 == d2+d3 or d2 == d1+d3 or d3 == d1+d2 then return true

Answer 3

• find the center of mass of corner points: cx=(x1+x2+x3+x4)/4, cy=(y1+y2+y3+y4)/4
• test if square of distances from center of mass to all 4 corners are equal

bool isRectangle(double x1, double y1,
                 double x2, double y2,
                 double x3, double y3,
                 double x4, double y4)
{
  double cx,cy;
  double dd1,dd2,dd3,dd4;

  cx=(x1+x2+x3+x4)/4;
  cy=(y1+y2+y3+y4)/4;

  dd1=sqr(cx-x1)+sqr(cy-y1);
  dd2=sqr(cx-x2)+sqr(cy-y2);
  dd3=sqr(cx-x3)+sqr(cy-y3);
  dd4=sqr(cx-x4)+sqr(cy-y4);
  return dd1==dd2 && dd1==dd3 && dd1==dd4;
}

(Of course in practice testing for equality of two floating point numbers a and b should be done with finite accuracy: e.g. abs(a-b) < 1E-6)

Answer 4

struct point
{
    int x, y;
}

// tests if angle abc is a right angle
int IsOrthogonal(point a, point b, point c)
{
    return (b.x - a.x) * (b.x - c.x) + (b.y - a.y) * (b.y - c.y) == 0;
}

int IsRectangle(point a, point b, point c, point d)
{
    return
        IsOrthogonal(a, b, c) &&
        IsOrthogonal(b, c, d) &&
        IsOrthogonal(c, d, a);
}

If the order is not known in advance, we need a slightly more complicated check:

int IsRectangleAnyOrder(point a, point b, point c, point d)
{
    return IsRectangle(a, b, c, d) ||
           IsRectangle(b, c, a, d) ||
           IsRectangle(c, a, b, d);
}