Recognizing Visibility Graphs of Polygons with Holes and Internal-External Visibility Graphs of Polygons

Visibility graph of a polygon corresponds to its internal diagonals and boundary edges. For each vertex on the boundary of the polygon, we have a vertex in this graph and if two vertices of the polygon see each other there is an edge between their corresponding vertices in the graph. Two vertices of a polygon see each other if and only if their connecting line segment completely lies inside the polygon, and they are externally visible if and only if this line segment completely lies outside the polygon. Recognizing visibility graphs is the problem of deciding whether there is a simple polygon whose visibility graph is isomorphic to a given input graph. This problem is well-known and well-studied, but yet widely open in geometric graphs and computational geometry. Existential Theory of the Reals is the complexity class of problems that can be reduced to the problem of deciding whether there exists a solution to a quantifier-free formula F(X1,X2,...,Xn), involving equalities and inequalities of real polynomials with real variables. The complete problems for this complexity class are called Existential Theory of the Reals Complete. In this paper we show that recognizing visibility graphs of polygons with holes is Existential Theory of the Reals Complete. Moreover, we show that recognizing visibility graphs of simple polygons when we have the internal and external visibility graphs, is also Existential Theory of the Reals Complete.Comment: Sumbitted to COCOON2018 Conferenc

Graphs with Plane Outside-Obstacle Representations

An \emph{obstacle representation} of a graph consists of a set of polygonal obstacles and a distinct point for each vertex such that two points see each other if and only if the corresponding vertices are adjacent. Obstacle representations are a recent generalization of classical polygon--vertex visibility graphs, for which the characterization and recognition problems are long-standing open questions. In this paper, we study \emph{plane outside-obstacle representations}, where all obstacles lie in the unbounded face of the representation and no two visibility segments cross. We give a combinatorial characterization of the biconnected graphs that admit such a representation. Based on this characterization, we present a simple linear-time recognition algorithm for these graphs. As a side result, we show that the plane vertex--polygon visibility graphs are exactly the maximal outerplanar graphs and that every chordal outerplanar graph has an outside-obstacle representation.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figure

Reconstructing Generalized Staircase Polygons with Uniform Step Length

Visibility graph reconstruction, which asks us to construct a polygon that has a given visibility graph, is a fundamental problem with unknown complexity (although visibility graph recognition is known to be in PSPACE). We show that two classes of uniform step length polygons can be reconstructed efficiently by finding and removing rectangles formed between consecutive convex boundary vertices called tabs. In particular, we give an $O(n^2m)$-time reconstruction algorithm for orthogonally convex polygons, where $n$ and $m$ are the number of vertices and edges in the visibility graph, respectively. We further show that reconstructing a monotone chain of staircases (a histogram) is fixed-parameter tractable, when parameterized on the number of tabs, and polynomially solvable in time $O(n^2m)$ under reasonable alignment restrictions.Comment: Appears in the Proceedings of the 25th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2017

Visibility graphs of towers

AbstractA tower is a polygon consisting of two reflex chains sharing one common endpoint, together with one edge joining the other endpoints of the chains. A linear time algorithm is given to recognize the [vertex] visibility graphs of towers, and these graphs are characterized as bipartite permutation graphs with an added Hamiltonian cycle. Similar results have been obtained independently by Choi, Shin and Chwa (1992)

A Characterization of Visibility Graphs for Pseudo-Polygons

In this paper, we give a characterization of the visibility graphs of pseudo-polygons. We first identify some key combinatorial properties of pseudo-polygons, and we then give a set of five necessary conditions based off our identified properties. We then prove that these necessary conditions are also sufficient via a reduction to a characterization of vertex-edge visibility graphs given by O'Rourke and Streinu

Terrain Visibility Graphs: Persistence Is Not Enough

In this paper, we consider the Visibility Graph Recognition and Reconstruction problems in the context of terrains. Here, we are given a graph $G$ with labeled vertices $v_0, v_1, \ldots, v_{n-1}$ such that the labeling corresponds with a Hamiltonian path $H$. $G$ also may contain other edges. We are interested in determining if there is a terrain $T$ with vertices $p_0, p_1, \ldots, p_{n-1}$ such that $G$ is the visibility graph of $T$ and the boundary of $T$ corresponds with $H$. $G$ is said to be persistent if and only if it satisfies the so-called X-property and Bar-property. It is known that every "pseudo-terrain" has a persistent visibility graph and that every persistent graph is the visibility graph for some pseudo-terrain. The connection is not as clear for (geometric) terrains. It is known that the visibility graph of any terrain $T$ is persistent, but it has been unclear whether every persistent graph $G$ has a terrain $T$ such that $G$ is the visibility graph of $T$. There actually have been several papers that claim this to be the case (although no formal proof has ever been published), and recent works made steps towards building a terrain reconstruction algorithm for any persistent graph. In this paper, we show that there exists a persistent graph $G$ that is not the visibility graph for any terrain $T$. This means persistence is not enough by itself to characterize the visibility graphs of terrains, and implies that pseudo-terrains are not stretchable.Comment: To appear in SoCG 202