On k-Convex Polygons

We introduce a notion of $k$-convexity and explore polygons in the plane that have this property. Polygons which are \mbox{$k$-convex} can be triangulated with fast yet simple algorithms. However, recognizing them in general is a 3SUM-hard problem. We give a characterization of \mbox{$2$-convex} polygons, a particularly interesting class, and show how to recognize them in \mbox{$O(n \log n)$} time. A description of their shape is given as well, which leads to Erd\H{o}s-Szekeres type results regarding subconfigurations of their vertex sets. Finally, we introduce the concept of generalized geometric permutations, and show that their number can be exponential in the number of \mbox{$2$-convex} objects considered.Comment: 23 pages, 19 figure

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

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

Orthogonal polygon reconstruction from stabbing information

AbstractReconstruction of polygons from visibility information is known to be a difficult problem in general. In this paper, we consider a special case: reconstruction of orthogonal polygons from horizontal and vertical visibility information and show that this reconstruction can be performed in O(nlogn) time

Turning function and shape recognition

The technique of turning function is a powerful method for measuring similarity between two dimensional shapes. The method works well when the boundary of the shape does not contain noise edges. We propose an algorithm for smoothing noise edges by decomposing the boundary into monotone components and smoothing the noise edges in each component. We also present an implementation of the proposed smoothing algorithm

On some geometric optimization problems.

An optimization problem is a computational problem in which the objective is to find the best of all possible solutions. A geometric optimization problem is an optimization problem induced by a collection of geometric objects. In this thesis we study two interesting geometric optimization problems. One is the all-farthest-segments problem in which given n points in the plane, we have to report for each point the segment determined by two other points that is farthest from it. The principal motive for studying this problem was to investigate if this problem could be solved with a worst-case time-complexity that is of lower order than O(n 2), which is the time taken by the solution of Duffy et al. (13) for the all-closest version of the same problem. If h be the number of points on the convex hull of the point set, we show how to do this in O(nh + n log n) time. Our solution to this problem has also triggered off research into the hitherto unexplored problem of determining the farthest-segment Voronoi Diagram of a given set of n line segments in the plane, leading to an O(n log n) time solution for the all-farthest-segments problem (12). For the second problem, we have revisited the problem of computing an area-optimal convex polygon stabbing a set of parallel line segments studied earlier by Kumar et al. (30). The primary motive behind this was to inquire if the line of attack used for the parallel-segments version can be extended to the case where the line segments are of arbitrary orientation. We have provided a correctness proof of the algorithm, which was lacking in the above-cited version. Implementation of geometric algorithms are of great help in visualizing the algorithms, we have implemented both the algorithms and trial versions are available at www.davinci.newcs.uwindsor.ca/ ∼asishm.Dept. of Computer Science. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2006 .C438. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 45-01, page: 0349. Thesis (M.Sc.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2006