Point Separation and Obstacle Removal by Finding and Hitting Odd Cycles
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Suppose we are given a pair of points s, t and a set S of n geometric objects in the plane, called obstacles. We show that in polynomial time one can construct an auxiliary (multi-)graph G with vertex set S and every edge labeled from {0, 1}, such that a set S_d ⊆ S of obstacles separates s from t if and only if G[S_d] contains a cycle whose sum of labels is odd. Using this structural characterization of separating sets of obstacles we obtain the following algorithmic results. In the Obstacle-Removal problem the task is to find a curve in the plane connecting s to t intersecting at most q obstacles. We give a 2.3146^qn^O(1) algorithm for Obstacle-Removal, significantly improving upon the previously best known q^O(q^3) n^O(1) algorithm of Eiben and Lokshtanov (SoCG'20). We also obtain an alternative proof of a constant factor approximation algorithm for Obstacle-Removal, substantially simplifying the arguments of Kumar et al. (SODA'21). In the Generalized Points-Separation problem, the input consists of the set S of obstacles, a point set A of k points and p pairs (s_1, t_1),... (s_p, t_p) of points from A. The task is to find a minimum subset S_r ⊆ S such that for every i, every curve from s_i to t_i intersects at least one obstacle in S_r. We obtain 2^O(p) n^O(k)-time algorithm for Generalized Points-Separation problem. This resolves an open problem of Cabello and Giannopoulos (SoCG'13), who asked about the existence of such an algorithm for the special case where (s_1, t_1), ... (s_p, t_p) contains all the pairs of points in A. Finally, we improve the running time of our algorithm to f(p,k) n^O(√(k)) when the obstacles are unit disks, where f(p,k) = 2^O(p) k^O(k), and show that, assuming the Exponential Time Hypothesis (ETH), the running time dependence on k of our algorithms is essentially optimal.
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