Potato peeling

This article is about a problem in computational geometry. For the devices used to peel potatoes, see peeler.

In computational geometry, the potato peeling or convex skull problem is a problem of finding the convex polygon of the largest possible area that lies within a given non-convex simple polygon. It was posed independently by Goodman and Woo,^[1][2] and solved in polynomial time by Chang and Yap.^[3] The exponent of the polynomial time bound is high, but the same problem can also be accurately approximated in near-linear time.^[4][5]