The problem of finding a collection of curves of minimum total length that meet all the lines intersecting a given polygon was initiated by Mazurkiewicz in 1916. Such a collection forms an opaque barrier for the polygon. In 1991 Shermer proposed an exponential-time algorithm that computes an interior-restricted barrier made of segments for any given convex n-gon. He conjectured that the barrier found by his algorithm is optimal, however this was refuted recently by Provan et al. Here we give a Shermer like algorithm that computes an interior polygonal barrier whose length is at most 1.7168 times the optimal and that runs in O(n) time. As a byproduct, we also deduce upper and lower bounds on the approximation ratio of Shermer's algorithm.
@InProceedings{dumitrescu_et_al:LIPIcs.APPROX-RANDOM.2014.128, author = {Dumitrescu, Adrian and Jiang, Minghui and T\'{o}th, Csaba D.}, title = {{Computing Opaque Interior Barriers \`{a} la Shermer}}, booktitle = {Approximation, Randomization, and Combinatorial Optimization. Algorithms and Techniques (APPROX/RANDOM 2014)}, pages = {128--143}, series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)}, ISBN = {978-3-939897-74-3}, ISSN = {1868-8969}, year = {2014}, volume = {28}, editor = {Jansen, Klaus and Rolim, Jos\'{e} and Devanur, Nikhil R. and Moore, Cristopher}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.APPROX-RANDOM.2014.128}, URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-46938}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.APPROX-RANDOM.2014.128}, annote = {Keywords: Opaque barrier, approximation algorithm, isoperimetric inequality} }
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