1 research outputs found
Polygon Simplification by Minimizing Convex Corners
Let be a polygon with reflex vertices and possibly with holes and
islands. A subsuming polygon of is a polygon such that , each connected component of is a subset of a distinct connected
component of , and the reflex corners of coincide with those of
. A subsuming chain of is a minimal path on the boundary of whose
two end edges coincide with two edges of . Aichholzer et al. proved that
every polygon has a subsuming polygon with vertices, and posed an
open problem to determine the computational complexity of computing subsuming
polygons with the minimum number of convex vertices.
We prove that the problem of computing an optimal subsuming polygon is
NP-complete, but the complexity remains open for simple polygons (i.e.,
polygons without holes). Our NP-hardness result holds even when the subsuming
chains are restricted to have constant length and lie on the arrangement of
lines determined by the edges of the input polygon. We show that this
restriction makes the problem polynomial-time solvable for simple polygons.Comment: 15 pages, 9 figure