Victor Klee introduce the art gallery problem during a conference in Stanford in August 1976 with that question: "How many guards are required to guard an art gallery?" In 1987, Ghosh provided an approximation algorithm for vertex guards problem that achieved $ O(\log n) $ approximation ratio. In 2017, Bhattacharya et. al presented an approximation algorithm for guarding weak visibility polygons. In our paper, we first implement these algorithms and then we test them for different types of polygons. We compare their performance in terms of number of guards used by them. In the last part, we have provided a new algorithm that uses Ghosh's idea. Experiments show that this algorithm assigns near optimal guards for guarding the input polygons.
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.
We consider a variant of the art gallery problem where all guards are limited to seeing to the right inside a monotone polygon. We call such guards: half-guards. We provide a polynomial-time approximation for point guarding the entire monotone polygon. We improve the best known approximation of 40 from [11], to 8. We also provide an NP-hardness reduction for point guarding a monotone polygon with half-guards.
There exist many variants of guarding an orthogonal polygon in an orthogonal fashion: sometimes a guard can see an entire rectangle, or along a staircase, or along an orthogonal path with at most $k$ bends. In this paper, we study all these guarding models in the special case of orthogonal polygons that have bounded treewidth in some sense. Exploiting algorithms for graphs of bounded treewidth, we show that the problem of finding the minimum number of guards in these models becomes linear-time solvable in orthogonal polygons of bounded treewidth.
We present an optimal, linear-time algorithm for the following version of terrain guarding: given a 1.5D terrain and a horizontal line, place the minimum number of guards on the line to see all of the terrain. We prove that the cardinality of the minimum guard set coincides with the cardinality of a maximum number of ``witnesses'', i.e., terrain points, no two of which can be seen by a single guard. We show that our results also apply to the Art Gallery problem in ``monotone mountains'', i.e., $x$-monotone polygons with a single edge as one of the boundary chains. This means that any monotone …
There is an old conjecture by Shermer \cite{sher} that in a polygon with $n$ vertices and $h$ holes, $\lfloor \dfrac{n+h}{3} \rfloor$ vertex guards are sufficient to guard the entire polygon. The conjecture is proved for $h=1$ by Shermer \cite{sher} and Aggarwal \cite{aga} seperately. In this paper, we prove a theorem similar to the Shermer's conjecture for a special case where the goal is to guard the vertices of the polygon (not the entire polygon) which is equivalent to finding a dominating set for the visibility graph of the polygon. Our proof also guarantees that the selected vertex guard…
We present two new versions of the chromatic art gallery problem that can improve upper bound of the required colors pretty well. In our version, we employ restricted angle guards so that these modern guards can visit $α$-degree of their surroundings. If $α$ is between $0$ and $180$ degree, we demonstrate that the strong chromatic guarding number is constant. Then we use orthogonal $90$-degree guards for guarding the polygons. We prove that the strong chromatic guarding number with orthogonal guards is the logarithmic order. First, we show that for the special cases of the orthogonal polygon s…
A hidden guard set $ G $ is a set of point guards in polygon $ P $ that all points of the polygon are visible from some guards in $ G $ under the constraint that no two guards may see each other. In this paper, we consider the problem for finding minimum hidden guard sets in histogram polygons under orthogonal visibility. Two points $ p $ and $ q $ are orthogonally visible if the orthogonal bounding rectangle for $ p $ and $ q $ lies within $ P $. It is known that the problem is NP-hard for simple polygon with general visibility and it is true for simple orthogonal polygon. We proposed a linea…
We are interested in the problem of guarding simple orthogonal polygons with the minimum number of $ r $-guards. The interior point $ p $ belongs an orthogonal polygon $ P $ is visible from $ r $-guard $ g $, if the minimum area rectangle contained $ p $ and $ q $ lies within $ P $. A set of point guards in polygon $ P $ is named guard set (as denoted $ G $) if the union of visibility areas of these point guards be equal to polygon $ P $ i.e. every point in $ P $ be visible from at least one point guards in $ G $. For an orthogonal polygon, if dual graph of vertical decomposition is a path, it…
The problem of vertex guarding a simple polygon was first studied by Subir K. Ghosh (1987), who presented a polynomial-time $O(\log n)$-approximation algorithm for placing as few guards as possible at vertices of a simple $n$-gon $P$, such that every point in $P$ is visible to at least one of the guards. Ghosh also conjectured that this problem admits a polynomial-time algorithm with constant approximation ratio. Due to the centrality of guarding problems in the field of computational geometry, much effort has been invested throughout the years in trying to resolve this conjecture. Despite som…
A sliding camera inside an orthogonal polygon $P$ is a point guard that travels back and forth along an orthogonal line segment $γ$ in $P$. The sliding camera $g$ can see a point $p$ in $P$ if the perpendicular from $p$ onto $γ$ is inside $P$. In this paper, we give the first constant-factor approximation algorithm for the problem of guarding $P$ with the minimum number of sliding cameras. Next, we show that the sliding guards problem is linear-time solvable if the (suitably defined) dual graph of the polygon has bounded treewidth. Finally, we study art gallery theorems for sliding cameras, th…
We consider a generalization of the classical Art Gallery Problem, where instead of a light source, the guards, called $k$-transmitters, model a wireless device with a signal that can pass through at most $k$ walls. We show it is NP-hard to compute a minimum cover of point 2-transmitters, point $k$-transmitters, and edge 2-transmitters in a simple polygon. The point 2-transmitter result extends to orthogonal polygons. In addition, we give necessity and sufficiency results for the number of edge 2-transmitters in general, monotone, orthogonal monotone, and orthogonal polygons.
Guarding a polygon with few guards is an old and well-studied problem in computational geometry. Here we consider the following variant: We assume that the polygon is orthogonal and thin in some sense, and we consider a point $p$ to guard a point $q$ if and only if the minimum axis-aligned rectangle spanned by $p$ and $q$ is inside the polygon. A simple proof shows that this problem is NP-hard on orthogonal polygons with holes, even if the polygon is thin. If there are no holes, then a thin polygon becomes a tree polygon in the sense that the so-called dual graph of the polygon is a tree. It w…
This paper focuses on a variation of the Art Gallery problem that considers open edge guards and open mobile guards. A mobile guard can be placed on edges and diagonals of a polygon, and the "open" prefix means that the endpoints of such edge or diagonal are not taken into account for visibility purposes. This paper studies the number of guards that are sufficient and sometimes necessary to guard some classes of simple polygons for both open edge and open mobile guards. This problem is also considered for planar triangulation graphs using open edge guards.
We study the problem of colouring the vertices of a polygon, such that every viewer in it can see a unique colour. The goal is to minimise the number of colours used. This is also known as the conflict-free chromatic guarding problem with vertex guards, and is motivated, e.g., by the problem of radio frequency assignment to sensors placed at the polygon vertices. We first study the scenario in which viewers can be all points of the polygon (such as a mobile robot which moves in the interior of the polygon). We efficiently solve the related problem of minimising the number of guards and approxi…
Given a simple polygon $\cal P$, in the Art Gallery problem the goal is to find the minimum number of guards needed to cover the entire $\cal P$, where a guard is a point and can see another point $q$ when $\overline{pq}$ does not cross the edges of $\cal P$. This paper studies a variant of the Art Gallery problem in which guards are restricted to lie on a dense grid inside $\cal P$. In the general problem, guards can be anywhere inside or on the boundary of $\cal P$. The general problem is called the \emph{point} guarding problem. It was proved that the point guarding problem is APX-complete,…
For a polygon P with n vertices, the vertex guarding problem asks for the minimum subset G of P's vertices such that every point in P is seen by at least one point in G. This problem is NP-complete and APX-hard. The first approximation algorithm (Ghosh, 1987) involves decomposing P into O(n^4) cells that are equivalence classes for visibility from the vertices of P. This discretized problem can then be treated as an instance of set cover and solved in O(n^5) time with a greedy O(log n)-approximation algorithm. Ghosh (2010) recently revisited the algorithm, noting that minimum visibility decomp…
We tackle the Art Gallery Problem and the Searchlight Scheduling Problem in 3-dimensional polyhedral environments, putting special emphasis on edge guards and orthogonal polyhedra.
The art gallery problem enquires about the least number of guards sufficient to ensure that an art gallery, represented by a simple polygon $P$, is fully guarded. Most standard versions of this problem are known to be NP-hard. In 1987, Ghosh provided a deterministic $\mathcal{O}(\log n)$-approximation algorithm for the case of vertex guards and edge guards in simple polygons. In the same paper, Ghosh also conjectured the existence of constant ratio approximation algorithms for these problems. We present here three polynomial-time algorithms with a constant approximation ratio for guarding an $…
We provide an O(log log OPT)-approximation algorithm for the problem of guarding a simple polygon with guards on the perimeter. We first design a polynomial-time algorithm for building epsilon-nets of size O(1/epsilon log log 1/epsilon) for the instances of Hitting Set associated with our guarding problem. We then apply the technique of Bronnimann and Goodrich to build an approximation algorithm from this epsilon-net finder. Along with a simple polygon P, our algorithm takes as input a finite set of potential guard locations that must include the polygon's vertices. If a finite set of potentia…
A terrain T is an x-monotone polygonal chain in the plane; T is orthogonal if each edge of T is either horizontal or vertical. In this paper, we give an exact algorithm for the problem of guarding the convex vertices of an orthogonal terrain with the minimum number of reflex vertices.
We devise an algorithm for surveying a dynamic orthogonal polygonal domain by placing one guard at each vertex in a subset of its vertices, i.e., whenever an orthogonal polygonal domain {\cal P'} is modified to result in another orthogonal polygonal domain {\cal P}, our algorithm updates the set of vertex guards surveying {\cal P'} so that the updated guard set surveys {\cal P}. Our algorithm modifies the guard placement in O(k \lg{(n+n')}) amortized time while ensuring the updated orthogonal polygonal domain with h holes and n vertices is guarded using at most \lfloor (n+2h)/4 \rfloor vertex …
Let $P$ be an orthogonal polygon. Consider a sliding camera that travels back and forth along an orthogonal line segment $s\in P$ as its \emph{trajectory}. The camera can see a point $p\in P$ if there exists a point $q\in s$ such that $pq$ is a line segment normal to $s$ that is completely inside $P$. In the \emph{minimum-cardinality sliding cameras problem}, the objective is to find a set $S$ of sliding cameras of minimum cardinality to guard $P$ (i.e., every point in $P$ can be seen by some sliding camera) while in the \emph{minimum-length sliding cameras problem} the goal is to find such a …
We study the classical Art Gallery Problem first proposed by Klee in 1973 from a mobile multi-agents perspective. Specifically, we require an optimally small number of agents (also called guards) to navigate and position themselves in the interior of an unknown simple polygon with $n$ vertices such that the collective view of all the agents covers the polygon. We consider the visibly connected setting wherein agents must remain connected through line of sight links -- a requirement particularly relevant to multi-agent systems. We first provide a centralized algorithm for the visibly connected …
The art gallery problem enquires about the least number of guards that are sufficient to ensure that an art gallery, represented by a polygon $P$, is fully guarded. In 1998, the problems of finding the minimum number of point guards, vertex guards, and edge guards required to guard $P$ were shown to be APX-hard by Eidenbenz, Widmayer and Stamm. In 1987, Ghosh presented approximation algorithms for vertex guards and edge guards that achieved a ratio of $\mathcal{O}(\log n)$, which was improved upto $\mathcal{O}(\log\log OPT)$ by King and Kirkpatrick in 2011. It has been conjectured that constan…
We study the Cooperative Guarding problem for polygons with holes in a mobile multi-agents setting. Given a set of agents, initially deployed at a point in a polygon with $n$ vertices and $h$ holes, we require the agents to collaboratively explore and position themselves in such a way that every point in the polygon is visible to at least one agent and that the set of agents are visibly connected. We study the problem under two models of computation, one in which the agents can compute exact distances and angles between two points in its visibility, and one in which agents can only compare dis…
We address recently proposed chromatic versions of the classic Art Gallery Problem. Assume a simple polygon $P$ is guarded by a finite set of point guards and each guard is assigned one of $t$ colors. Such a chromatic guarding is said to be conflict-free if each point $p\in P$ sees at least one guard with a unique color among all guards visible from $p$. The goal is to establish bounds on the function $χ_{cf}(n)$ of the number of colors sufficient to guarantee the existence of a conflict-free chromatic guarding for any $n$-vertex polygon. Bärtschi and Suri showed $χ_{cf}(n)\in O(\log n)$ (Algo…
We present approximation algorithms with O(n^3) processing time for the minimum vertex and edge guard problems in simple polygons. It is improved from previous O(n^4) time algorithms of Ghosh. For simple polygon, there are O(n^3) visibility regions, thus any approximation algorithm for the set covering problem with approximation ratio of log(n) can be used for the approximation of n vertex and edge guard problems with O(n^3) visibility sequence. We prove that the visibility of all points in simple polygons is guaranteed by covering O(n^2) sinks from vertices and edges : It comes to O(n^3) time…
Consider a sliding camera that travels back and forth along an orthogonal line segment $s$ inside an orthogonal polygon $P$ with $n$ vertices. The camera can see a point $p$ inside $P$ if and only if there exists a line segment containing $p$ that crosses $s$ at a right angle and is completely contained in $P$. In the minimum sliding cameras (MSC) problem, the objective is to guard $P$ with the minimum number of sliding cameras. In this paper, we give an $O(n^{5/2})$-time $(7/2)$-approximation algorithm to the MSC problem on any simple orthogonal polygon with $n$ vertices, answering a question…
Art Gallery is a fundamental visibility problem in Computational Geometry. The input consists of a simple polygon P, (possibly infinite) sets G and C of points within P, and an integer k; the task is to decide if at most k guards can be placed on points in G so that every point in C is visible to at least one guard. In the classic formulation of Art Gallery, G and C consist of all the points within P. Other well-known variants restrict G and C to consist either of all the points on the boundary of P or of all the vertices of P. Recently, three new important discoveries were made: the above men…
This paper addresses the problem of tracking mobile intruders in a polygonal environment. We assume that a team of diagonal guards is deployed inside the polygon to provide mobile coverage. First, we formulate the problem of tracking a mobile intruder inside a polygonal environment as a multi-robot task allocation (MRTA) problem. Leveraging on guard deployment strategies in art gallery problems for mobile coverage, we show that the problem of finding the minimum speed of guards to persistently track a single mobile intruder is NP-hard. Next, for a given maximum speed of the intruder and the gu…
Art Gallery Localization (AGL) is the problem of placing a set $T$ of broadcast towers in a simple polygon $P$ in order for a point to locate itself in the interior. For any point $p \in P$: for each tower $t \in T \cap V(p)$ (where $V(p)$ denotes the visibility polygon of $p$) the point $p$ receives the coordinates of $t$ and the Euclidean distance between $t$ and $p$. From this information $p$ can determine its coordinates. We study the computational complexity of AGL problem. We show that the problem of determining the minimum number of broadcast towers that can localize a point anywhere in…
We prove that every simply connected orthogonal polygon of $n$ vertices can be partitioned into $\left\lfloor\frac{3 n +4}{16}\right\rfloor$ (simply connected) orthogonal polygons of at most 8 vertices. It yields a new and shorter proof of the theorem of A. Aggarwal that $\left\lfloor\frac{3 n +4}{16}\right\rfloor$ mobile guards are sufficient to control the interior of an $n$-vertex orthogonal polygon. Moreover, we strengthen this result by requiring combinatorial guards (visibility is only required at the endpoints of patrols) and prohibiting intersecting patrols. This yields positive answer…
We consider the problem of monitoring an art gallery modeled as a polygon, the edges of which are arcs of curves, with edge or mobile guards. Our focus is on piecewise-convex polygons, i.e., polygons that are locally convex, except possibly at the vertices, and their edges are convex arcs. We transform the problem of monitoring a piecewise-convex polygon to the problem of 2-dominating a properly defined triangulation graph with edges or diagonals, where 2-dominance requires that every triangle in the triangulation graph has at least two of its vertices in its 2-dominating set. We show that $\l…
A set $G$ of points on a 1.5-dimensional terrain, also known as an $x$-monotone polygonal chain, is said to guard the terrain if any point on the terrain is 'seen' by a point in $G$. Two points on the terrain see each other if and only if the line segment between them is never strictly below the terrain. The minimum terrain guarding problem asks for a minimum guarding set for the given input terrain. We prove that the decision version of this problem is NP-hard. This solves a significant open problem and complements recent positive approximability results for the optimization problem. Our proo…
We study the art gallery problem for opposing half guards: guards that can either see to their left or to their right only. We present art gallery theorems, show that the location of half guards in 2-guardable polygons is not restricted to extensions, show that the problem is NP-hard in monotone polygons, and present approximation algorithms for spiral and staircase polygons.
Given a simple polygon $\cal P$, in the Art Gallery problem, the goal is to find the minimum number of guards needed to cover the entire $\cal P$, where a guard is a point and can see another point $q$ when $\overline{pq}$ does not cross the edges of $\cal P$. This paper studies a variant of the Art Gallery problem in which the boundaries of $\cal P$ are replaced by single specular-reflection edges, allowing the view rays to reflect once per collision with an edge. This property allows the guards to see through the reflections, thereby viewing a larger portion of the polygon. For this problem,…
We introduce the notion of a normal gallery, a gallery in which any configuration of guards that visually covers the walls covers the entire gallery. We show that any star gallery is normal and any gallery with at most two reflex corners is normal. A polynomial time algorithm is provided deciding if, for a given polygon and a finite set of positions, there exists a configuration of guards in some of these positions that visually covers the walls but not the entire gallery.
We consider guarding classes of simple polygons using mobile guards (polygon edges and diagonals) under the constraint that no two guards may see each other. In contrast to most other art gallery problems, existence is the primary question: does a specific type of polygon admit some guard set? Types include simple polygons and the subclasses of orthogonal, monotone, and starshaped polygons. Additionally, guards may either exclude or include the endpoints (so-called open and closed guards). We provide a nearly complete set of answers to existence questions of open and closed edge, diagonal, and…
The Art Gallery Problem (AGP) is one of the classical problems in computational geometry. It asks for the minimum number of guards required to achieve visibility coverage of a given polygon. The AGP is well-known to be NP-hard even in restricted cases. In this paper, we consider the Art Gallery Problem with Fading (AGPF): A polygonal region is to be illuminated with light sources such that every point is illuminated with at least a global threshold, light intensity decreases over distance, and we seek to minimize the total energy consumption. Choosing fading exponents of zero, one, and two are…
We study the problem of placing a set $T$ of broadcast towers in a simple polygon $P$ in order for any point to locate itself in the interior of $P$. Let $V(p)$ denote the visibility polygon of a point $p$, as the set of all points $q \in P$ that are visible to $p$. For any point $p \in P$: for each tower $t \in T \cap V(p)$ the point $p$ receives the coordinates of $t$ and the Euclidean distance between $t$ and $p$. From this information $p$ can determine its coordinates. We show a tower-positioning algorithm that computes such a set $T$ of size at most $\lfloor 2n/3\rfloor$, where $n$ is the…
Rutgers University at New Brunswick（罗格斯大学新不伦瑞克分校）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
We investigate the problem of optimally assigning a large number of robots (or other types of autonomous agents) to guard the perimeters of closed 2D regions, where the perimeter of each region to be guarded may contain multiple disjoint polygonal chains. Each robot is responsible for guarding a subset of a perimeter and any point on a perimeter must be guarded by some robot. In allocating the robots, the main objective is to minimize the maximum 1D distance to be covered by any robot along the boundary of the regions. For this optimization problem which we call optimal perimeter guarding (OPG…
A sliding k-transmitter in an orthogonal polygon P is a mobile guard that travels back and forth along an orthogonal line segment s inside P. It can see a point p in P if the perpendicular from p onto s intersects the boundary of P at most k times. We show that guarding an orthogonal polygon P with the minimum number of k-transmitters is NP-hard, for any fixed k>0, even if P is simple and monotone. Moreover, we give an O(1)-approximation algorithm for this problem.
We prove that the art gallery problem is equivalent under polynomial time reductions to deciding whether a system of polynomial equations over the real numbers has a solution. The art gallery problem is a classical problem in computational geometry. Given a simple polygon $P$ and an integer $k$, the goal is to decide if there exists a set $G$ of $k$ guards within $P$ such that every point $p\in P$ is seen by at least one guard $g\in G$. Each guard corresponds to a point in the polygon $P$, and we say that a guard $g$ sees a point $p$ if the line segment $pg$ is contained in $P$. The art galler…
Given a simple polygon $\mathcal{P}$ on $n$ vertices, two points $x,y$ in $\mathcal{P}$ are said to be visible to each other if the line segment between $x$ and $y$ is contained in $\mathcal{P}$. The Point Guard Art Gallery problem asks for a minimum set $S$ such that every point in $\mathcal{P}$ is visible from a point in $S$. The Vertex Guard Art Gallery problem asks for such a set $S$ subset of the vertices of $\mathcal{P}$. A point in the set $S$ is referred to as a guard. For both variants, we rule out any $f(k)n^{o(k / \log k)}$ algorithm, where $k := |S|$ is the number of guards, for an…
Given an orthogonal connected arrangement of line-segments, Minimum Corridor Guarding(MCG) problem asks for an optimal tree/closed walk such that, if a guard moves through the tree/closed walk, all the line-segments are visited by the guard. This problem is referred to as Corridor-MST/Corridor-TSP (CMST/CTSP) for the cases when the guarding walk is a tree/closed walk, respectively. The corresponding decision version of MCG is shown to be NP-Complete[1]. The parameterized version of CMST/CTSP referred to as k-CMST/k-CTSP, asks for an optimal tree/closed walk on at most k vertices, that visits a…
