Finding an approximate minimum-link visibility path inside a simple polygon.pdf

Finding an Approximate Minimum-Link Visibility Path Inside aSimple PolygonMuhammad H. AlsuwaiyelDepartment of Information andComputer ScienceKing Fahd University of Petroleum MineralsDhahran 31261, Saudi Arabiae-mail:facp079@saupm00.bitnet D.T. Lee1Department of Electrical Engineering andComputer ScienceNorthwestern UniversityEvanston, IL 60208e-mail: dtlee@eecs.nwu.eduKeywords: Computational geometry, approximation algorithm, simple polygon,visibility path, minimum link path.1 IntroductionIn [1] Alsuwaiyel and Lee showed that computing a minimum link path  inside a simplepolygon with n vertices such that the interior of the polygon is weakly visible from  isNP-hard. The authors also presented an O(n3 log n) time algorithm for producing an ap-proximate solution that was claimed to have no more than 3 times the number of links ofan optimal solution. In [2] Arkin et al. show that the problem of nding a minimum-linkwatchman route in polygonal domains (with holes)2 is NP-complete and give a polynomial-time approximation algorithm with performance ratio of log n. In fact the algorithm in [1]gives a feasible solution with no bound guarantee. Here we describe in a more precise waythe approximation algorithm that constructs a watchman path as well as a tour in timemaxfm2;mng = O(n2), where m is the link-length of an optimal path, and show that in-deed a constant performance ratio of no more than 4 can be attained in a simple polygonaldomain (i.e., no holes). We also show that the performance ratio can be improved to 3:5with time bound maxfm3;mng = O(n3).2 PreliminariesLet x be any re ex vertex adjacent to another vertex u in a simple polygon P . Let H be theinnite half line originating at x in the direction from u to x. Let y be the intersection of Hand the boundary of P closest to x. Then, the directed line segmentw = xy is called a window1Supported in part by the National Science Foundation under the Grant CCR-9309743, and by the Oceof Naval Research under the Grant