I am building a map and want to use the leaflet markercluster plugin to cluster any markers that intersect visibly (the icons overlap each other). I can't seem to figure out a way to check whether the markers icons intersect though.
I've examined the documentation and the Marker objects. The marker object has no "bounds" object and has no function to return the bounds of the icon.
Yes, it's possible.
This is implemented in some Leaflet plugins, like Leaflet.LayerGroup.Collision - the technique involves fetching the computed style of each icon's HTML element to get the actual size in CSS pixels, offset those numbers by the relative pixel position of the marker's LatLng, and using a rtree data structure to speed up the calculation of the overlaps. Do have a look at the complete source for LayerGroup.Collision plugin.
Note that this technique only takes into account the rectangular bounding boxes of the icons; while it would be possible to check for the individual transparent pixels, that would involve more complex data structures and a different technique to fetch the opacity of each pixel.
