On Some Geometric Aspects of the Class of hv-Convex Switching Components

In the usual aim of discrete tomography, the reconstruction of an unknown discrete set is considered, by means of projection data collected along a set U of discrete directions. Possible ambiguous reconstructions can arise if and only if switching components occur, namely, if and only if non-empty images exist having null projections along all the directions in U. In order to lower the number of allowed reconstructions, one tries to incorporate possible extra geometric constraints in the tomographic problem. In particular, the class P of horizontally and vertically convex connected sets (briefly, hv-convex polyominoes) has been largely considered. In this paper we introduce the class of hv-convex switching components, and prove some preliminary results on their geometric structure. The class includes all switching components arising when the tomographic problem is considered in P, which highly motivates the investigation of such configurations. It turns out that the considered class can be partitioned in two disjointed subclasses of closed patterns, called windows and curls, respectively. It follows that all windows have a unique representation, while curls consist of interlaced sequences of sub-patterns, called Z-paths, which leads to the problem of understanding the combinatorial structure of such sequences. We provide explicit constructions of families of curls associated to some special sequences, and also give additional details on further allowed or forbidden configurations by means of a number of illustrative examples

The number of directed k-convex polyominoes

We present a new method to obtain the generating functions for directed convex polyominoes according to several different statistics including: width, height, size of last column/row and number of corners. This method can be used to study different families of directed convex polyominoes: symmetric polyominoes, parallelogram polyominoes. In this paper, we apply our method to determine the generating function for directed k-convex polyominoes. We show it is a rational function and we study its asymptotic behavior

A family of classes in nested chain abacus and related generating functions

Abacus model has been employed widely to represent partitions for any positive integer. However, no study has been carried out to develop connected beads of abacus in graphical representation for discrete objects. To resolve this connectedness problem this study is oriented in characterising n - connected objects knows as n connected ominoes, which then generate nested chain abacus. Furthermore, the theoretical conceptual properties for the nested chain abacus are being formulated. Along the construction, three different types of transformation are being created that are essential in building a family of classes. To enhance further, based on theses classes, generating functions are also being formulated by employing enumeration of combinatorial objects (ECO). In ECO method, each object is obtained from smaller object by making some local expansions. These local expansions are described in a simple way by a succession rule which can be translated into a function equation for the generating function. In summary, this stud has succeeded in producing novel graphical representation of nested chain abacus, which can be applied in tiling finite grid