We present an $O(nlog n)$-time algorithm that determines whether a given planar $n$-gon is weakly simple. This improves upon an $O(n^2log n)$-time algorithm by Chang, Erickson, and Xu (2015). Weakly simple polygons are required as input for several geometric algorithms. As such, how to recognize simple or weakly simple polygons is a fundamental question.
In this extended abstract, we present a PTAS for guarding the vertices of a weakly-visible polygon $P$ from a subset of its vertices, or in other words, a PTAS for computing a minimum dominating set of the visibility graph of the vertices of $P$. We then show how to obtain a PTAS for vertex guarding $P$s boundary.
Given a set $S$ of $m$ point sites in a simple polygon $P$ of $n$ vertices, we consider the problem of computing the geodesic farthest-point Voronoi diagram for $S$ in $P$. It is known that the problem has an $Omega(n+mlog m)$ time lower bound. Previously, a randomized algorithm was proposed [Barba, SoCG 2019] that can solve the problem in $O(n+mlog m)$ expected time. The previous best deterministic algorithms solve the problem in $O(nlog log n+ mlog m)$ time [Oh, Barba, and Ahn, SoCG 2016] or in $O(n+mlog m+mlog^2 n)$ time [Oh and Ahn, SoCG 2017]. In this paper, we present a deterministic algorithm of $O(n+mlog m)$ time, which is optimal. This answers an open question posed by Mitchell in the Handbook of Computational Geometry two decades ago.
We study several problems concerning convex polygons whose vertices lie in a Cartesian product (for short, grid) of two sets of n real numbers. First, we prove that every such grid contains a convex polygon with $Omega$(log n) vertices and that this bound is tight up to a constant factor. We generalize this result to d dimensions (for a fixed d $in$ N), and obtain a tight lower bound of $Omega$(log d--1 n) for the maximum number of points in convex position in a d-dimensional grid. Second, we present polynomial-time algorithms for computing the largest convex chain in a grid that contains no two points of the same x-or y-coordinate. We show how to efficiently approximate the maximum size of a supported convex polygon up to a factor of 2. Finally, we present exponential bounds on the maximum number of convex polygons in these grids, and for some restricted variants. These bounds are tight up to polynomial factors.
In the MINIMUM CONVEX COVER (MCC) problem, we are given a simple polygon $mathcal P$ and an integer $k$, and the question is if there exist $k$ convex polygons whose union is $mathcal P$. It is known that MCC is $mathsf{NP}$-hard [Culberson & Reckhow: Covering polygons is hard, FOCS 1988/Journal of Algorithms 1994] and in $existsmathbb{R}$ [ORourke: The complexity of computing minimum convex covers for polygons, Allerton 1982]. We prove that MCC is $existsmathbb{R}$-hard, and the problem is thus $existsmathbb{R}$-complete. In other words, the problem is equivalent to deciding whether a system of polynomial equations and inequalities with integer coefficients has a real solution. If a cover for our constructed polygon exists, then so does a cover consisting entirely of triangles. As a byproduct, we therefore also establish that it is $existsmathbb{R}$-complete to decide whether $k$ triangles cover a given polygon. The issue that it was not known if finding a minimum cover is in $mathsf{NP}$ has repeatedly been raised in the literature, and it was mentioned as a long-standing open question already in 2001 [Eidenbenz & Widmayer: An approximation algorithm for minimum convex cover with logarithmic performance guarantee, ESA 2001/SIAM Journal on Computing 2003]. We prove that assuming the widespread belief that $mathsf{NP} eqexistsmathbb{R}$, the problem is not in $mathsf{NP}$. An implication of the result is that many natural approaches to finding small covers are bound to give suboptimal solutions in some cases, since irrational coordinates of arbitrarily high algebraic degree can be needed for the corners of the pieces in an optimal solution.
We provide exact and approximation methods for solving a geometric relaxation of the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) that occurs in curve reconstruction: for a given set of vertices in the plane, the problem Minimum Perimeter Polygon (MPP) asks for a (not necessarily simply connected) polygon with shortest possible boundary length. Even though the closely related problem of finding a minimum cycle cover is polynomially solvable by matching techniques, we prove how the topological structure of a polygon leads to NP-hardness of the MPP. On the positive side, we show how to achieve a constant-factor approximation. When trying to solve MPP instances to provable optimality by means of integer programming, an additional difficulty compared to the TSP is the fact that only a subset of subtour constraints is valid, depending not on combinatorics, but on geometry. We overcome this difficulty by establishing and exploiting additional geometric properties. This allows us to reliably solve a wide range of benchmark instances with up to 600 vertices within reasonable time on a standard machine. We also show that using a natural geometry-based sparsification yields results that are on average within 0.5% of the optimum.