The problem is formally known as the redundancy removal. Let be a set of points in . We say a point is redundant (for ) if . In short, redundant points are unnecessary to determine the convex hull .
In principle, one can apply the linear programming (LP) method given in 2.19 to remove all redundant points. This amounts to solving LPs. While the time complexity of this pure LP method is polynomial and additional techniques given by [Cla94,OSS95] can reduce the size of LPs, this might end up in a very time consuming job for large (say ).
There is a technique that might be useful to remove ``obviously redundant'' points quickly as a preprocessing. This works only in small dimensions (probably up to ?). Such a method picks up a few nonredundant point set from . Selecting nonredundant points can be done by picking points maximizing (or minimizing) any given linear function over . When is small relative to , say or , the computation of is usually very easy with any standard convex hull algorithm. Thus we assume that an inequality system such that is given. It is easy to see that any point satisfying the inequalities (i.e. ) is redundant. One can repeat the same procedure with a different set of nonredundant points as long as it removes ``sufficient number'' of redundant points.