Compact Visibility Representation of Plane Graphs

The visibility representation (VR for short) is a classical representation of plane graphs. It has various applications and has been extensively studied. A main focus of the study is to minimize the size of the VR. It is known that there exists a plane graph $G$ with $n$ vertices where any VR of $G$ requires a grid of size at least (2/3)n x((4/3)n-3) (width x height). For upper bounds, it is known that every plane graph has a VR with grid size at most (2/3)n x (2n-5), and a VR with grid size at most (n-1) x (4/3)n. It has been an open problem to find a VR with both height and width simultaneously bounded away from the trivial upper bounds (namely with size at most c_h n x c_w n with c_h < 1 and c_w < 2$). In this paper, we provide the first VR construction with this property. We prove that every plane graph of n vertices has a VR with height <= max{23/24 n + 2 Ceil(sqrt(n))+4, 11/12 n + 13} and width <= 23/12 n. The area (height x width) of our VR is larger than the area of some of previous results. However, bounding one dimension of the VR only requires finding a good st-orientation or a good dual s^*t^*-orientation of G. On the other hand, to bound both dimensions of VR simultaneously, one must find a good $st$-orientation and a good dual s^*t^*-orientation at the same time, and thus is far more challenging. Since st-orientation is a very useful concept in other applications, this result may be of independent interests.