We introduce numerical algebraic geometry methods for computing lower bounds on the reach, local feature size, and weak feature size of the real part of an equidimensional and smooth algebraic variety using the variety’s defining polynomials as input. For the weak feature size, we also show that nonquadratic complete intersections generically have finitely many geometric bottlenecks, and we describe how to compute the weak feature size directly rather than a lower bound in this case. In all other cases, we describe additional computations that can be used to determine feature size values rather than lower bounds.
Funding: The fifth author was supported in part by NSF grant CCF-181274. The fourth author was supported in part by EPSRC EP/R018472/1 and Bristol Myers Squibb. The first author was partially supported by the VR grant NT:2018-03688.