On the Oß-hull of a planar point set

© 2018. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/We study the Oß-hull of a planar point set, a generalization of the Orthogonal Convex Hull where the coordinate axes form an angle ß. Given a set P of n points in the plane, we show how to maintain the Oß-hull of P while ß runs from 0 to p in T(n log n) time and O(n) space. With the same complexity, we also find the values of ß that maximize the area and the perimeter of the Oß-hull and, furthermore, we find the value of ß achieving the best fitting of the point set P with a two-joint chain of alternate interior angle ß.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

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

Distributions of points in the unit square and large k-gons

AbstractWe consider a generalization of Heilbronn’s triangle problem by asking, given any integers n≥k, for the supremum Δk(n) of the minimum area determined by the convex hull of some k of n points in the unit square [0,1]2, where the supremum is taken over all distributions of n points in [0,1]2. Improving the lower bound Δk(n)=Ω(1/n(k−1)/(k−2)) from [C. Bertram-Kretzberg, T. Hofmeister, H. Lefmann, An algorithm for Heilbronn’s problem, SIAM Journal on Computing 30 (2000) 383–390] and from [W.M. Schmidt, On a problem of Heilbronn, Journal of the London Mathematical Society (2) 4 (1972) 545–550] for k=4, we show that Δk(n)=Ω((logn)1/(k−2)/n(k−1)/(k−2)) for fixed integers k≥3 as asked for in [C. Bertram-Kretzberg, T. Hofmeister, H. Lefmann, An algorithm for Heilbronn’s problem, SIAM Journal on Computing 30 (2000) 383–390]. Moreover, we provide a deterministic polynomial time algorithm which finds n points in [0,1]2, which achieve this lower bound on Δk(n)

Set Estimation Under Biconvexity Restrictions

A set in the Euclidean plane is said to be biconvex if, for some angle $\theta\in[0,\pi/2)$, all its sections along straight lines with inclination angles $\theta$ and $\theta+\pi/2$ are convex sets (i.e, empty sets or segments). Biconvexity is a natural notion with some useful applications in optimization theory. It has also be independently used, under the name of "rectilinear convexity", in computational geometry. We are concerned here with the problem of asymptotically reconstructing (or estimating) a biconvex set $S$ from a random sample of points drawn on $S$. By analogy with the classical convex case, one would like to define the "biconvex hull" of the sample points as a natural estimator for $S$. However, as previously pointed out by several authors, the notion of "hull" for a given set $A$ (understood as the "minimal" set including $A$ and having the required property) has no obvious, useful translation to the biconvex case. This is in sharp contrast with the well-known elementary definition of convex hull. Thus, we have selected the most commonly accepted notion of "biconvex hull" (often called "rectilinear convex hull"): we first provide additional motivations for this definition, proving some useful relations with other convexity-related notions. Then, we prove some results concerning the consistent approximation of a biconvex set $S$ and and the corresponding biconvex hull. An analogous result is also provided for the boundaries. A method to approximate, from a sample of points on $S$, the biconvexity angle $\theta$ is also given