111,715 research outputs found
The Complexity of Separating Points in the Plane
We study the following separation problem: given n connected curves and two points s and t in the plane, compute the minimum number of curves one needs to retain so that any path connecting s to t intersects some of the retained curves. We give the first polynomial (O(n3)) time algorithm for the problem, assuming that the curves have reasonable computational properties. The algorithm is based on considering the intersection graph of the curves, defining an appropriate family of closed walks in the intersection graph that satisfies the 3-path-condition, and arguing that a shortest cycle in the family gives an optimal solution. The 3-path-condition has been used mainly in topological graph theory, and thus its use here makes the connection to topology clear. We also show that the generalized version, where several input points are to be separated, is NP-hard for natural families of curves, like segments in two directions or unit circles
The complexity of separating points in the plane
We study the following separation problem: given n connected curves and two points s and t in the plane, compute the minimum number of curves one needs to retain so that any path connecting s to t intersects some of the retained curves. We give the first polynomial (O(n3)) time algorithm for the problem, assuming that the curves have reasonable computational properties. The algorithm is based on considering the intersection graph of the curves, defining an appropriate family of closed walks in the intersection graph that satisfies the 3-path-condition, and arguing that a shortest cycle in the family gives an optimal solution. The 3-path-condition has been used mainly in topological graph theory, and thus its use here makes the connection to topology clear. We also show that the generalized version, where several input points are to be separated, is NP-hard for natural families of curves, like segments in two directions or unit circles
Computing largest circles separating two sets of segments
A circle separates two planar sets if it encloses one of the sets and its
open interior disk does not meet the other set. A separating circle is a
largest one if it cannot be locally increased while still separating the two
given sets. An Theta(n log n) optimal algorithm is proposed to find all largest
circles separating two given sets of line segments when line segments are
allowed to meet only at their endpoints. In the general case, when line
segments may intersect times, our algorithm can be adapted to
work in O(n alpha(n) log n) time and O(n \alpha(n)) space, where alpha(n)
represents the extremely slowly growing inverse of the Ackermann function.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, abstract presented at 8th Canadian Conference on
Computational Geometry, 199
Geodesic-Preserving Polygon Simplification
Polygons are a paramount data structure in computational geometry. While the
complexity of many algorithms on simple polygons or polygons with holes depends
on the size of the input polygon, the intrinsic complexity of the problems
these algorithms solve is often related to the reflex vertices of the polygon.
In this paper, we give an easy-to-describe linear-time method to replace an
input polygon by a polygon such that (1)
contains , (2) has its reflex
vertices at the same positions as , and (3) the number of vertices
of is linear in the number of reflex vertices. Since the
solutions of numerous problems on polygons (including shortest paths, geodesic
hulls, separating point sets, and Voronoi diagrams) are equivalent for both
and , our algorithm can be used as a preprocessing
step for several algorithms and makes their running time dependent on the
number of reflex vertices rather than on the size of
- …