New results on stabbing segments with a polygon

We consider a natural variation of the concept of stabbing a set of segments with a simple polygon: a segment s is stabbed by a simple polygon P if at least one endpoint of s is contained in P, and a segment set S is stabbed by P if P stabs every element of S. Given a segment set S, we study the problem of finding a simple polygon P stabbing S in a way that some measure of P (such as area or perimeter) is optimized. We show that if the elements of S are pairwise disjoint, the problem can be solved in polynomial time. In particular, this solves an open problem posed by Loftier and van Kreveld [Algorithmica 56(2), 236-269 (2010)] [16] about finding a maximum perimeter convex hull for a set of imprecise points modeled as line segments. Our algorithm can also be extended to work for a more general problem, in which instead of segments, the set S consists of a collection of point sets with pairwise disjoint convex hulls. We also prove that for general segments our stabbing problem is NP-hard. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Computing Smallest Convex Intersecting Polygons

Funding Information: Funding Mark de Berg is supported by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) through Gravitation-grant NETWORKS-024.002.003. Antonis Skarlatos: Part of the work was done during an internship at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken, Germany. Publisher Copyright: © 2022 Schloss Dagstuhl- Leibniz-Zentrum fur Informatik GmbH, Dagstuhl Publishing. All rights reserved.A polygon C is an intersecting polygon for a set O of objects in R2 if C intersects each object in O, where the polygon includes its interior. We study the problem of computing the minimum-perimeter intersecting polygon and the minimum-area convex intersecting polygon for a given set O of objects. We present an FPTAS for both problems for the case where O is a set of possibly intersecting convex polygons in the plane of total complexity n. Furthermore, we present an exact polynomial-time algorithm for the minimum-perimeter intersecting polygon for the case where O is a set of n possibly intersecting segments in the plane. So far, polynomial-time exact algorithms were only known for the minimum perimeter intersecting polygon of lines or of disjoint segments.Peer reviewe

On the number of sides necessary for polygonal approximation of black-and-white figures in a plane

A bound on the number of extreme points or sides necessary to approximate a convex planar figure by an enclosing polygon is described. This number is found to be proportional to the fourth root of the figure's area divided by the square of a maximum Euclidean distance approximation parameter.An extension of this bound, preserving its fourth root quality, is made to general planar figures. This is done by decomposing the general figure into nearly convex sets defined by inflection points, cusps, and multiple windings.A procedure for performing actual encoding of this type is described. Comparisons of parsimony are made with contemporary figure encoding schemes