65 research outputs found
Stabbing Pairwise Intersecting Disks by Five Points
Suppose we are given a set D of n pairwise intersecting disks in the plane. A planar point set P stabs D if and only if each disk in D contains at least one point from P. We present a deterministic algorithm that takes O(n) time to find five points that stab D. Furthermore, we give a simple example of 13 pairwise intersecting disks that cannot be stabbed by three points.
This provides a simple - albeit slightly weaker - algorithmic version of a classical result by Danzer that such a set D can always be stabbed by four points
Searching edges in the overlap of two plane graphs
Consider a pair of plane straight-line graphs, whose edges are colored red
and blue, respectively, and let n be the total complexity of both graphs. We
present a O(n log n)-time O(n)-space technique to preprocess such pair of
graphs, that enables efficient searches among the red-blue intersections along
edges of one of the graphs. Our technique has a number of applications to
geometric problems. This includes: (1) a solution to the batched red-blue
search problem [Dehne et al. 2006] in O(n log n) queries to the oracle; (2) an
algorithm to compute the maximum vertical distance between a pair of 3D
polyhedral terrains one of which is convex in O(n log n) time, where n is the
total complexity of both terrains; (3) an algorithm to construct the Hausdorff
Voronoi diagram of a family of point clusters in the plane in O((n+m) log^3 n)
time and O(n+m) space, where n is the total number of points in all clusters
and m is the number of crossings between all clusters; (4) an algorithm to
construct the farthest-color Voronoi diagram of the corners of n axis-aligned
rectangles in O(n log^2 n) time; (5) an algorithm to solve the stabbing circle
problem for n parallel line segments in the plane in optimal O(n log n) time.
All these results are new or improve on the best known algorithms.Comment: 22 pages, 6 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
Piercing Diametral Disks Induced by Edges of Maximum Spanning Tree
Let be a set of points in the plane and let be a maximum-weight
spanning tree of . For an edge , let be the diametral disk
induced by , i.e., the disk having the segment as its
diameter. Let be the set of the diametral disks induced by the
edges of . In this paper, we show that one point is sufficient to pierce all
the disks in , thus, the set is Helly. Actually, we show
that the center of the smallest enclosing circle of is contained in all the
disks of , and thus the piercing point can be computed in linear
time.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure
Witness (Delaunay) Graphs
Proximity graphs are used in several areas in which a neighborliness
relationship for input data sets is a useful tool in their analysis, and have
also received substantial attention from the graph drawing community, as they
are a natural way of implicitly representing graphs. However, as a tool for
graph representation, proximity graphs have some limitations that may be
overcome with suitable generalizations. We introduce a generalization, witness
graphs, that encompasses both the goal of more power and flexibility for graph
drawing issues and a wider spectrum for neighborhood analysis. We study in
detail two concrete examples, both related to Delaunay graphs, and consider as
well some problems on stabbing geometric objects and point set discrimination,
that can be naturally described in terms of witness graphs.Comment: 27 pages. JCCGG 200
Efficiently stabbing convex polygons and variants of the Hadwiger-Debrunner -theorem
Hadwiger and Debrunner showed that for families of convex sets in
with the property that among any of them some have a
common point, the whole family can be stabbed with points if and . This generalizes a classical result by Helly.
We show how such a stabbing set can be computed for a family of convex polygons
in the plane with a total of vertices in expected time. For polyhedra in , we
get an algorithm running in expected time. We also investigate other conditions on convex polygons
for which our algorithm can find a fixed number of points stabbing them.
Finally, we show that analogous results of the Hadwiger and Debrunner
-theorem hold in other settings, such as convex sets in
or abstract convex geometries
Line transversals to disjoint balls
We prove that the set of directions of lines intersecting three disjoint
balls in in a given order is a strictly convex subset of . We then
generalize this result to disjoint balls in . As a consequence, we can
improve upon several old and new results on line transversals to disjoint balls
in arbitrary dimension, such as bounds on the number of connected components
and Helly-type theorems.Comment: 21 pages, includes figure
Geometric Permutations of Non-Overlapping Unit Balls Revisited
Given four congruent balls in that have disjoint
interior and admit a line that intersects them in the order , we show
that the distance between the centers of consecutive balls is smaller than the
distance between the centers of and . This allows us to give a new short
proof that interior-disjoint congruent balls admit at most three geometric
permutations, two if . We also make a conjecture that would imply that
such balls admit at most two geometric permutations, and show that if
the conjecture is false, then there is a counter-example of a highly degenerate
nature
- …