Geometric transformations on the hexagonal grid.

The hexagonal grid has long been known to be superior to the more traditional rectangular grid system in many aspects in image processing and machine vision related fields. However, systematic developments of the mathematical backgrounds for the hexagonal grid are conspicuously lacking. The purpose of this paper is to study geometric transformations on the hexagonal grid. Formulations of the transformation matrices are carried out in a symmetrical hexagonal coordinate frame. A trio of new trigonometric functions are defined in this paper to facilitate the rotation transformations. A fast algorithm for rounding an arbitrary point to the nearest hexagonal grid point is also presented.