A Constant-Factor Approximation Algorithm for Point Guarding an Art Gallery

TL;DR

This paper presents a constant-factor approximation algorithm for the point guarding problem in simple polygons when guards are restricted to a dense grid, improving upon previous logarithmic approximation bounds.

Contribution

It introduces a novel constant-factor approximation algorithm for grid-restricted point guarding, a significant advancement over prior logarithmic approximation results.

Findings

Achieves a constant approximation factor independent of the grid size.

The algorithm's running time depends on the grid's number of cells.

Provides a theoretical foundation for grid-restricted guard placement.

Abstract

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, meaning that we cannot do better than a constant-factor approximation algorithm unless $P = NP$. A huge amount of research is committed to the studies of combinatorial and algorithmic aspects of this problem, and as of this time, we could not find a constant factor approximation for simple polygons. The last best-known approximation factor for point guarding a simple polygon was $\mathcal{O}(\log (|OPT|))$ introduced by E. Bonnet and T. Miltzow in 2020, where $|OPT|$ is the size of the optimal solution. Here, we propose an algorithm with a constant approximation factor for the point guarding problem where the location of guards is restricted to a grid. The running time of the proposed algorithm depends on the number of cells of the grid. The approximation factor is constant regardless of the grid we use, the running time could be super-polynomial if the grid size becomes exponential.