Line Segment Covering of Cells in Arrangements

TL;DR

This paper investigates the computational complexity of covering cells in arrangements with line segments, proving NP-hardness, fixed parameter tractability, and providing efficient algorithms for specific cases.

Contribution

It establishes NP-hardness for the cell covering problem, shows fixed parameter tractability for covering rectangular cells, and offers a linear-time solution for recursively subdivided arrangements.

Findings

NP-hardness of the general problem, even for axis-aligned segments

Fixed parameter tractability when covering rectangular cells

Linear-time algorithm for arrangements from recursive subdivisions

Abstract

Given a collection $L$ of line segments, we consider its arrangement and study the problem of covering all cells with line segments of $L$. That is, we want to find a minimum-size set $L'$ of line segments such that every cell in the arrangement has a line from $L'$ defining its boundary. We show that the problem is NP-hard, even when all segments are axis-aligned. In fact, the problem is still NP-hard when we only need to cover rectangular cells of the arrangement. For the latter problem we also show that it is fixed parameter tractable with respect to the size of the optimal solution. Finally we provide a linear time algorithm for the case where cells of the arrangement are created by recursively subdividing a rectangle using horizontal and vertical cutting segments.