LINEAR-TIME 3-APPROXIMATION ALGORITHM FOR THE r-STAR COVERING PROBLEM
The complexity status of the minimum r-star cover problem for orthogonal polygons had been open for many years, until 2004 when Ch. Worman and J. M. Keil proved it to be polynomially tractable (Polygon decomposition and the orthogonal art gallery problem, IJCGA 17(2) (2007), 105-138). However, since their algorithm has (O) over tilde (n(17))-time complexity, where (O) over tilde (.) hides a polylogarithmic factor, and thus it is not practical, in this paper we present a linear-time 3-approximation algorithm. Our approach is based upon the novel partition of an orthogonal polygon into so-called o-star-shaped orthogonal polygons.
r-star cover orthogonal polygon approximation algorithms