Vertex guarding in weak visibility polygons

Abstract

The art gallery problem enquires about the least number of guards that are sufficient to ensure that an art gallery, represented by a polygon P, is fully guarded. In 1998, the problems of finding the minimum number of point guards, vertex guards, and edge guards required to guard P were shown to be APX-hard by Eidenbenz, Widmayer and Stamm. In 1987, Ghosh presented approximation algorithms for vertex guards and edge guards that achieved a ratio of O(log n), which was improved upto O(log log OPT) by King and Kirkpatrick in 2011. It has been conjectured that constant-factor approximation algorithms exist for these problems. We settle the conjecture for the special class of polygons that are weakly visible from an edge and contain no holes by presenting a 6-approximation algorithm for finding the minimum number of vertex guards that runs in O(n2) time. On the other hand, for weak visibility polygons with holes, we present a reduction from the Set Cover problem to show that there cannot exist a polynomial time algorithm for the vertex guard problem with an approximation ratio better than ((1 – ε)/12) ln n for any ε > 0, unless NP = P.