Minimum Area Bounding Box

I find myself drawing bounding boxes around things a lot. I don’t know why I do it so much, but for whatever reason I do, and as of late I wanted to up my bounding box game. In the past, I have simply used the global min and max in both the x and y directions to get the coordinates to form the bounding box; however, this is not always the most elegant solution. For example, when my data follows somewhat of a linear trend, I am left with ample white space not filled by any valuable information.

Figure 1: Simple Bounding Box

Figure 2: Minimum Area Bounding Box

This got me thinking, why am I not simply drawing a bounding box around only the data? Sounds great, right? The only problem was I had no idea how to do this. Luckily, there is this thing called the internet and it has vast stores of information and ideas to pull from. I found a very elegant solution by Jesse Buesking on stackoverflow.com which was posted on November 9, 2015. The solution was written in Python which I converted to IDL. My goal in posting this is to show an awesome way to draw a bounding box and also an example of translating between IDL and Python.