Minimum Hidden Guarding of Histogram Polygons

A hidden guard set $G$ is a set of point guards in polygon $P$ that all points of the polygon are visible from some guards in $G$ under the constraint that no two guards may see each other. In this paper, we consider the problem for finding minimum hidden guard sets in histogram polygons under orthogonal visibility. Two points $p$ and $q$ are orthogonally visible if the orthogonal bounding rectangle for $p$ and $q$ lies within $P$. It is known that the problem is NP-hard for simple polygon with general visibility and it is true for simple orthogonal polygon. We proposed a linear time exact algorithm for finding minimum hidden guard set in histogram polygons under orthogonal visibility. In our algorithm, it is allowed that guards place everywhere in the polygon

Some Results on Open Edge and Open Mobile Guarding of Polygons and Triangulations

This paper focuses on a variation of the Art Gallery problem that considers open edge guards and open mobile guards. A mobile guard can be placed on edges and diagonals of a polygon, and the "open" prefix means that the endpoints of such edge or diagonal are not taken into account for visibility purposes. This paper studies the number of guards that are sufficient and sometimes necessary to guard some classes of simple polygons for both open edge and open mobile guards. This problem is also considered for planar triangulation graphs using open edge guards.Comment: 13 page

Smoothed Analysis of the Art Gallery Problem

In the Art Gallery Problem we are given a polygon $P\subset [0,L]^2$ on $n$ vertices and a number $k$. We want to find a guard set $G$ of size $k$, such that each point in $P$ is seen by a guard in $G$. Formally, a guard $g$ sees a point $p \in P$ if the line segment $pg$ is fully contained inside the polygon $P$. The history and practical findings indicate that irrational coordinates are a "very rare" phenomenon. We give a theoretical explanation. Next to worst case analysis, Smoothed Analysis gained popularity to explain the practical performance of algorithms, even if they perform badly in the worst case. The idea is to study the expected performance on small perturbations of the worst input. The performance is measured in terms of the magnitude $\delta$ of the perturbation and the input size. We consider four different models of perturbation. We show that the expected number of bits to describe optimal guard positions per guard is logarithmic in the input and the magnitude of the perturbation. This shows from a theoretical perspective that rational guards with small bit-complexity are typical. Note that describing the guard position is the bottleneck to show NP-membership. The significance of our results is that algebraic methods are not needed to solve the Art Gallery Problem in typical instances. This is the first time an $\exists\mathbb{R}$-complete problem was analyzed by Smoothed Analysis.Comment: 24 pages, 12 Figure

Distance domination, guarding and vertex cover for maximal outerplanar graph

This paper discusses a distance guarding concept on triangulation graphs, which can be associated with distance domination and distance vertex cover. We show how these subjects are interconnected and provide tight bounds for any n-vertex maximal outerplanar graph: the 2d-guarding number, g_{2d}(n) = n/5; the 2d-distance domination number, gamma_{2d}(n) = n/5; and the 2d-distance vertex cover number, beta_{2d}(n) = n/4

Approximability of Guarding Weak Visibility Polygons

The art gallery problem enquires about the least number of guards that are sufficient to ensure that an art gallery, represented by a polygon $P$, is fully guarded. In 1998, the problems of finding the minimum number of point guards, vertex guards, and edge guards required to guard $P$ were shown to be APX-hard by Eidenbenz, Widmayer and Stamm. In 1987, Ghosh presented approximation algorithms for vertex guards and edge guards that achieved a ratio of $\mathcal{O}(\log n)$, which was improved upto $\mathcal{O}(\log\log OPT)$ by King and Kirkpatrick in 2011. It has been conjectured that constant-factor approximation algorithms exist for these problems. We settle the conjecture for the special class of polygons that are weakly visible from an edge and contain no holes by presenting a 6-approximation algorithm for finding the minimum number of vertex guards that runs in $\mathcal{O}(n^2)$ time. On the other hand, for weak visibility polygons with holes, we present a reduction from the Set Cover problem to show that there cannot exist a polynomial time algorithm for the vertex guard problem with an approximation ratio better than $((1 - \epsilon)/12)\ln n$ for any $\epsilon>0$, unless NP=P. We also show that, for the special class of polygons without holes that are orthogonal as well as weakly visible from an edge, the approximation ratio can be improved to 3. Finally, we consider the Point Guard problem and show that it is NP-hard in the case of polygons weakly visible from an edge.Comment: 23 pages, 21 figures, 30 citation

Guard Placement For Wireless Localization

Motivated by secure wireless networking, we consider the problem of placing fixed localizers that enable mobile communication devices to prove they belong to a secure region that is defined by the interior of a polygon. Each localizer views an infinite wedge of the plane, and a device can prove membership in the secure region if it is inside the wedges for a set of localizers whose common intersection contains no points outside the polygon. This model leads to a broad class of new art gallery type problems, for which we provide upper and lower bounds

Constant Approximation Algorithms for Guarding Simple Polygons using Vertex Guards

The art gallery problem enquires about the least number of guards sufficient to ensure that an art gallery, represented by a simple polygon $P$, is fully guarded. Most standard versions of this problem are known to be NP-hard. In 1987, Ghosh provided a deterministic $\mathcal{O}(\log n)$-approximation algorithm for the case of vertex guards and edge guards in simple polygons. In the same paper, Ghosh also conjectured the existence of constant ratio approximation algorithms for these problems. We present here three polynomial-time algorithms with a constant approximation ratio for guarding an $n$-sided simple polygon $P$ using vertex guards. (i) The first algorithm, that has an approximation ratio of 18, guards all vertices of $P$ in $\mathcal{O}(n^4)$ time. (ii) The second algorithm, that has the same approximation ratio of 18, guards the entire boundary of $P$ in $\mathcal{O}(n^5)$ time. (iii) The third algorithm, that has an approximation ratio of 27, guards all interior and boundary points of $P$ in $\mathcal{O}(n^5)$ time. Further, these algorithms can be modified to obtain similar approximation ratios while using edge guards. The significance of our results lies in the fact that these results settle the conjecture by Ghosh regarding the existence of constant-factor approximation algorithms for this problem, which has been open since 1987 despite several attempts by researchers. Our approximation algorithms exploit several deep visibility structures of simple polygons which are interesting in their own right.Comment: 39 pages, 31 figure

A Leapfrog Strategy for Pursuit-Evasion in a Polygonal Environment

We study pursuit-evasion in a polygonal environment with polygonal obstacles. In this turn based game, an evader $e$ is chased by pursuers $p_1, p_2, ..., p_{\ell}$. The players have full information about the environment and the location of the other players. The pursuers are allowed to coordinate their actions. On the pursuer turn, each $p_i$ can move to any point at distance at most 1 from his current location. On the evader turn, he moves similarly. The pursuers win if some pursuer becomes co-located with the evader in finite time. The evader wins if he can evade capture forever. It is known that one pursuer can capture the evader in any simply-connected polygonal environment, and that three pursuers are always sufficient in any polygonal environment (possibly with polygonal obstacles). We contribute two new results to this field. First, we fully characterize when an environment with a single obstacles is one-pursuer-win or two-pursuer-win. Second, we give sufficient (but not necessary) conditions for an environment to have a winning strategy for two pursuers. Such environments can be swept by a \emph{leapfrog strategy} in which the two cops alternately guard/increase the currently controlled area. The running time of this algorithm is $O(n \cdot h \cdot {diam}(P))$ where $n$ is the number of vertices, $h$ is the number of obstacles and ${diam}(P)$ is the diameter of $P$. More concretely, for an environment with $n$ vertices, we describe an $O(n^2)$ algorithm that (1) determines whether the obstacles are well-separated, and if so, (2) constructs the required partition for a leapfrog strategy.Comment: 25 pages, 10 figure

Combinatorics of Beacon-based Routing in Three Dimensions

A beacon is a point-like object which can be enabled to exert a magnetic pull on other point-like objects in space. Those objects then move towards the beacon in a greedy fashion until they are either stuck at an obstacle or reach the beacon's location. Beacons placed inside polyhedra can be used to route point-like objects from one location to another. A second use case is to cover a polyhedron such that every point-like object at an arbitrary location in the polyhedron can reach at least one of the beacons once the latter is activated. The notion of beacon-based routing and guarding was introduced by Biro et al. [FWCG'11] in 2011 and covered in detail by Biro in his PhD thesis [SUNY-SB'13], which focuses on the two-dimensional case. We extend Biro's result to three dimensions by considering beacon routing in polyhedra. We show that $\lfloor\frac{m+1}{3}\rfloor$ beacons are always sufficient and sometimes necessary to route between any pair of points in a given polyhedron $P$, where $m$ is the number of tetrahedra in a tetrahedral decomposition of $P$. This is one of the first results that show that beacon routing is also possible in three dimensions.Comment: v1 published in "LATIN 2018: Theoretical Informatics"; v2 to be published in "Computational Geometry - Theory and Application

Vertex Guarding for Dynamic Orthogonal Art Galleries

We devise an algorithm for surveying a dynamic orthogonal polygonal domain by placing one guard at each vertex in a subset of its vertices, i.e., whenever an orthogonal polygonal domain {\cal P'} is modified to result in another orthogonal polygonal domain {\cal P}, our algorithm updates the set of vertex guards surveying {\cal P'} so that the updated guard set surveys {\cal P}. Our algorithm modifies the guard placement in O(k \lg{(n+n')}) amortized time while ensuring the updated orthogonal polygonal domain with h holes and n vertices is guarded using at most \lfloor (n+2h)/4 \rfloor vertex guards. For the special case of the initial orthogonal polygon being hole-free and each update resulting in a hole-free orthogonal polygon, our guard update algorithm takes O(k\lg{(n+n')}) worst-case time. Here, n' and n are the number of vertices of the orthogonal polygon before and after the update, respectively; and, k is the sum of |n - n'| and the number of updates to a few structures maintained by our algorithm. Further, by giving a construction, we show it suffices for the algorithm to consider only the case in which the parity of the number of reflex vertices of both {\cal P'} and {\cal P} are equal.Comment: accepted to IJCG