Placing a minimum number of guards on a given watchman route in a polygonal domain is called the {\em minimum vision points problem}. We prove that finding the minimum number of vision points on a shortest watchman route in a simple polygon is APX-Hard. We then extend the proof to the class of rectilinear polygons having at most three dent orientations.
On the approximability of covering points by lines and related problems
Given a set $P$ of $n$ points in the plane, { \sc Covering Points by Lines} is the problem of finding a minimum-cardinality set $Ł$ of lines such that every point $p \in P$ is incident to some line $\ell \in Ł$ . As a geometric variant of { \sc Set Cover}, { \sc Covering Points by Lines} is still NP-hard. Moreover, it has been proved to be APX-hard, and hence does not admit any polynomial-time approximation scheme unless P $=$ NP\@. In contrast to the small constant approximation lower bound implied by APX-hardness, the current best approximation ratio for { \sc Covering Points by Lines} is st…
We consider the Minimum Convex Partition problem: Given a set P of n points in the plane, draw a plane graph G on P, with positive minimum degree, such that G partitions the convex hull of P into a minimum number of convex faces. We show that Minimum Convex Partition is NP-hard, and we give several approximation algorithms, from an O(log OPT)-approximation running in O(n^8)-time, where OPT denotes the minimum number of convex faces needed, to an O(sqrt(n) log n)-approximation algorithm running in O(n^2)-time. We say that a point set is k-directed if the (straight) lines containing at least thr…
Bereg et al. (2012) introduced the Boxes Class Cover problem, which has its roots in classification and clustering applications: Given a set of n points in the plane, each colored red or blue, find the smallest cardinality set of axis-aligned boxes whose union covers the red points without covering any blue point. In this paper we give an alternative proof of APX-hardness for this problem, which also yields an explicit lower bound on its approximability. Our proof also directly applies when restricted to sets of points in general position and to the case where so-called half-strips are conside…
In the Minimum Installation Path problem, we are given a graph $G$ with edge weights $w(.)$ and two vertices $s,t$ of $G$. We want to assign a non-negative power $p(v)$ to each vertex $v$ of $G$ so that the edges $uv$ such that $p(u)+p(v)$ is at least $w(uv)$ contain some $s$-$t$-path, and minimize the sum of assigned powers. In the Minimum Barrier Shrinkage problem, we are given a family of disks in the plane and two points $x$ and $y$ lying outside the disks. The task is to shrink the disks, each one possibly by a different amount, so that we can draw an $x$-$y$ curve that is disjoint from t…
In this paper we study the following problem: Given $k$ disjoint sets of points, $P_1, \ldots, P_k$ on the plane, find a minimum cardinality set $\mathcal{T}$ of arbitrary rectangles such that each rectangle contains points of just one set $P_i$ but not the others. We prove the NP-hardness of this problem.
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…
For an undirected edge-weighted graph $G$ and a set $R$ of pairs of vertices called pairs of terminals, a multicut is a set of edges such that removing these edges from $G$ disconnects each pair in $R$. We provide an algorithm computing a $(1+\varepsilon)$-approximation of the minimum multicut of a graph $G$ in time $(g+t)^{(O(g+t)^3)}\cdot(1/\varepsilon)^{O(g+t)} \cdot n \log n$, where $g$ is the genus of $G$ and $t$ is the number of terminals. This result is tight in several aspects, as the minimum multicut problem is both APX-hard and W[1]-hard (parameterized by the number of terminals), ev…
Given two points s and t in the plane and a set of obstacles defined by closed curves, what is the minimum number of obstacles touched by a path connecting s and t? This is a fundamental and well-studied problem arising naturally in computational geometry, graph theory (under the names Min-Color Path and Minimum Label Path), wireless sensor networks (Barrier Resilience) and motion planning (Minimum Constraint Removal). It remains NP-hard even for very simple-shaped obstacles such as unit-length line segments. In this paper we give the first constant factor approximation algorithm for this prob…
We consider a spectrum of geometric optimization problems motivated by contexts such as satellite communication and astrophysics. In the problem Minimum Scan Cover with Angular Costs, we are given a graph $G$ that is embedded in Euclidean space. The edges of $G$ need to be scanned, i.e., probed from both of their vertices. In order to scan their edge, two vertices need to face each other; changing the heading of a vertex incurs some cost in terms of energy or rotation time that is proportional to the corresponding rotation angle. Our goal is to compute schedules that minimize the following obj…