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Rodrigo I. Silveira

Publications and source records attributed to Rodrigo I. Silveira.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

Algorithms for Distance Problems in Continuous Graphs

We study the problem of computing the diameter and the mean distance of a continuous graph, i.e., a connected graph where all points along the edges, instead of only the vertices, must be taken into account. It is known that for continuous graphs with $m$ edges these values can be computed in roughly $O(m^2)$ time. In this paper, we use geometric techniques to obtain subquadratic time algorithms to compute the diameter and the mean distance of a continuous graph for two well-established classes of sparse graphs. We show that the diameter and the mean distance of a continuous graph of treewidth at most $k$ can be computed in $O(n\log^{O(k)} n)$ time, where $n$ is the number of vertices in the graph. We also show that computing the diameter and mean distance of a continuous planar graph with $n$ vertices and $F$ faces takes $O(n F \log n)$ time.

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arXiv2026

The Borsuk number of a graph

The Borsuk problem asks for the smallest number of subsets with strictly smaller diameters into which any bounded set in the $d$-dimensional space can be decomposed. It is a classical problem in combinatorial geometry that has been subject of much attention over the years, and research on variants of the problem continues nowadays in a plethora of directions. In this work, we propose a formulation of the problem in the context of graphs. Depending on how the graph is partitioned, we consider two different settings dealing either with the usual notion of diameter in abstract graphs, or with the diameter in the context of continuous graphs, where all points along the edges, instead of only the vertices, must be taken into account when computing distances. We present complexity results, exact computations and upper bounds on the parameters associated to the problem.

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arXiv2026

Exact solutions to the Weighted Region Problem

In this paper, we consider the Weighted Region Problem. In the Weighted Region Problem, the length of a path is defined as the sum of the weights of the subpaths within each region, where the weight of a subpath is its Euclidean length multiplied by a weight $ α\geq 0 $ depending on the region. We study a restricted version of the problem of determining shortest paths through a single weighted rectangular region. We prove that even this very restricted version of the problem is unsolvable within the Algebraic Computation Model over the Rational Numbers (ACMQ). On the positive side, we provide the equations for the shortest paths that are computable within the ACMQ. Additionally, we provide equations for the bisectors between regions of the Shortest Path Map for a source point on the boundary of (or inside) the rectangular region.

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arXiv2026

On the complexity of covering points by guillotine cuts

We show that the problem of covering a set of points in the plane with a minimum number of guillotine cuts is NP-complete. To that end, first we present a new NP-completeness proof for the problem of covering points with disjoint line segments. Then, we adapt the proof to show that the problem remains NP-complete when the segments are guillotine cuts.

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arXiv2025

Theoretical analysis of beaconless geocast protocols in 1D

Beaconless geocast protocols are routing protocols used to send messages in mobile ad-hoc wireless networks, in which the only information available to each node is its own location. Messages get routed in a distributed manner: each node uses local decision rules based on the message source and destination, and its own location. In this paper we analyze six different beaconless geocast protocols, focusing on two relevant 1D scenarios. The selection of protocols reflects the most relevant types of protocols proposed in the literature, including those evaluated in previous computer simulations. We present a formal and structured analysis of the maximum number of messages that a node can receive, for each protocol, in each of the two scenarios. This is a measure of the network load incurred by each protocol. Our analysis, that for some of the protocols requires an involved probabilistic analysis, confirms behaviors that had been observed only through simulations before.

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arXiv2025

Terrain prickliness: theoretical grounds for high complexity viewsheds

An important task in terrain analysis is computing \emph{viewsheds}. A viewshed is the union of all the parts of the terrain that are visible from a given viewpoint or set of viewpoints. The complexity of a viewshed can vary significantly depending on the terrain topography and the viewpoint position. In this work we study a new topographic attribute, the \emph{prickliness}, that measures the number of local maxima in a terrain from all possible angles of view. We show that the prickliness effectively captures the potential of 2.5D TIN terrains to have high complexity viewsheds. We present optimal and (under standard assumptions) near-optimal algorithms to compute it for 1.5D and 2.5D TIN terrains, respectively, and efficient approximate algorithms for raster DEMs. We validate the usefulness of the prickliness attribute with experiments in a large set of real terrains.

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arXiv2024

On approximating shortest paths in weighted triangular tessellations

We study the quality of weighted shortest paths when a continuous 2-dimensional space is discretized by a weighted triangular tessellation. In order to evaluate how well the tessellation approximates the 2-dimensional space, we study three types of shortest paths: a weighted shortest path $ \mathit{SP_w}(s,t) $, which is a shortest path from $ s $ to $ t $ in the space; a weighted shortest vertex path $ \mathit{SVP_w}(s,t) $, which is an any-angle shortest path; and a weighted shortest grid path $ \mathit{SGP_w}(s,t) $, which is a shortest path whose edges are edges of the tessellation. Given any arbitrary weight assignment to the faces of a triangular tessellation, thus extending recent results by Bailey et al. [Path-length analysis for grid-based path planning. Artificial Intelligence, 301:103560, 2021], we prove upper and lower bounds on the ratios $ \frac{\lVert \mathit{SGP_w}(s,t)\rVert}{\lVert \mathit{SP_w}(s,t)\rVert} $, $ \frac{\lVert \mathit{SVP_w}(s,t)\rVert}{\lVert \mathit{SP_w}(s,t)\rVert} $, $ \frac{\lVert \mathit{SGP_w}(s,t)\rVert}{\lVert \mathit{SVP_w}(s,t)\rVert} $, which provide estimates on the quality of the approximation. It turns out, surprisingly, that our worst-case bounds are independent of any weight assignment. Our main result is that $ \frac{\lVert \mathit{SGP_w}(s,t)\rVert}{\lVert \mathit{SP_w}(s,t)\rVert} = \frac{2}{\sqrt{3}} \approx 1.15 $ in the worst case, and this is tight. As a corollary, for the weighted any-angle path $ \mathit{SVP_w}(s,t) $ we obtain the approximation result $ \frac{\lVert \mathit{SVP_w}(s,t)\rVert}{\lVert \mathit{SP_w}(s,t)\rVert} \lessapprox 1.15 $.

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arXiv2024

Computing largest minimum color-spanning intervals of imprecise points

We study a geometric facility location problem under imprecision. Given $n$ unit intervals in the real line, each with one of $k$ colors, the goal is to place one point in each interval such that the resulting \emph{minimum color-spanning interval} is as large as possible. A minimum color-spanning interval is an interval of minimum size that contains at least one point from a given interval of each color. We prove that if the input intervals are pairwise disjoint, the problem can be solved in $O(n)$ time, even for intervals of arbitrary length. For overlapping intervals, the problem becomes much more difficult. Nevertheless, we show that it can be solved in $O(n \log^2 n)$ time when $k=2$, by exploiting several structural properties of candidate solutions, combined with a number of advanced algorithmic techniques. Interestingly, this shows a sharp contrast with the 2-dimensional version of the problem, recently shown to be NP-hard.

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arXiv2024

Approximating shortest paths in weighted square and hexagonal meshes

Continuous 2-dimensional space is often discretized by considering a mesh of weighted cells. In this work we study how well a weighted mesh approximates the space, with respect to shortest paths. We consider a shortest path $ \mathit{SP_w}(s,t) $ from $ s $ to $ t $ in the continuous 2-dimensional space, a shortest vertex path $ \mathit{SVP_w}(s,t) $ (or any-angle path), which is a shortest path where the vertices of the path are vertices of the mesh, and a shortest grid path $ \mathit{SGP_w}(s,t) $, which is a shortest path in a graph associated to the weighted mesh. We provide upper and lower bounds on the ratios $ \frac{\lVert \mathit{SGP_w}(s,t)\rVert}{\lVert \mathit{SP_w}(s,t)\rVert} $, $ \frac{\lVert \mathit{SVP_w}(s,t)\rVert}{\lVert \mathit{SP_w}(s,t)\rVert} $, $ \frac{\lVert \mathit{SGP_w}(s,t)\rVert}{\lVert \mathit{SVP_w}(s,t)\rVert} $ in square and hexagonal meshes, extending previous results for triangular grids. These ratios determine the effectiveness of existing algorithms that compute shortest paths on the graphs obtained from the grids. Our main results are that the ratio $ \frac{\lVert \mathit{SGP_w}(s,t)\rVert}{\lVert \mathit{SP_w}(s,t)\rVert} $ is at most $ \frac{2}{\sqrt{2+\sqrt{2}}} \approx 1.08 $ and $ \frac{2}{\sqrt{2+\sqrt{3}}} \approx 1.04 $ in a square and a hexagonal mesh, respectively.

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arXiv2023

Shortest Paths in Portalgons

Any surface that is intrinsically polyhedral can be represented by a collection of simple polygons (fragments), glued along pairs of equally long oriented edges, where each fragment is endowed with the geodesic metric arising from its Euclidean metric. We refer to such a representation as a portalgon, and we call two portalgons equivalent if the surfaces they represent are isometric. We analyze the complexity of shortest paths in portalgons. We call a fragment happy if any shortest path on the portalgon visits it at most a constant number of times. A portalgon is happy if all of its fragments are happy. We present an efficient algorithm to compute shortest paths on happy portalgons. The number of times that a shortest path visits a fragment is unbounded in general. We contrast this by showing that the intrinsic Delaunay triangulation of any polyhedral surface corresponds to a happy portalgon. Since computing the intrinsic Delaunay triangulation may be inefficient, we provide an efficient algorithm to compute happy portalgons for a restricted class of portalgons.

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arXiv2023

Continuous mean distance of a weighted graph

We study the concept of the continuous mean distance of a weighted graph. For connected unweighted graphs, the mean distance can be defined as the arithmetic mean of the distances between all pairs of vertices. This parameter provides a natural measure of the compactness of the graph, and has been intensively studied, together with several variants, including its version for weighted graphs. The continuous analog of the (discrete) mean distance is the mean of the distances between all pairs of points on the edges of the graph. Despite being a very natural generalization, to the best of our knowledge this concept has been barely studied, since the jump from discrete to continuous implies having to deal with an infinite number of distances, something that increases the difficulty of the parameter. In this paper we show that the continuous mean distance of a weighted graph can be computed in time quadratic in the number of edges, by two different methods that apply fundamental concepts in discrete algorithms and computational geometry. We also present structural results that allow a faster computation of this continuous parameter for several classes of weighted graphs. Finally, we study the relation between the (discrete) mean distance and its continuous counterpart, mainly focusing on the relevant question of the convergence when iteratively subdividing the edges of the weighted graph.

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arXiv2022

Efficient Fréchet distance queries for segments

We study the problem of constructing a data structure that can store a two-dimensional polygonal curve $P$, such that for any query segment $\overline{ab}$ one can efficiently compute the Fréchet distance between $P$ and $\overline{ab}$. First we present a data structure of size $O(n \log n)$ that can compute the Fréchet distance between $P$ and a horizontal query segment $\overline{ab}$ in $O(\log n)$ time, where $n$ is the number of vertices of $P$. In comparison to prior work, this significantly reduces the required space. We extend the type of queries allowed, as we allow a query to be a horizontal segment $\overline{ab}$ together with two points $s, t \in P$ (not necessarily vertices), and ask for the Fréchet distance between $\overline{ab}$ and the curve of $P$ in between $s$ and $t$. Using $O(n\log^2n)$ storage, such queries take $O(\log^3 n)$ time, simplifying and significantly improving previous results. We then generalize our results to query segments of arbitrary orientation. We present an $O(nk^{3+\varepsilon}+n^2)$ size data structure, where $k \in [1..n]$ is a parameter the user can choose, and $\varepsilon > 0$ is an arbitrarily small constant, such that given any segment $\overline{ab}$ and two points $s, t \in P$ we can compute the Fréchet distance between $\overline{ab}$ and the curve of $P$ in between $s$ and $t$ in $O((n/k)\log^2n+\log^4 n)$ time. This is the first result that allows efficient exact Fréchet distance queries for arbitrarily oriented segments. We also present two applications of our data structure: we show that we can compute a local $δ$-simplification (with respect to the Fréchet distance) of a polygonal curve in $O(n^{5/2+\varepsilon})$ time, and that we can efficiently find a translation of an arbitrary query segment $\overline{ab}$ that minimizes the Fréchet distance with respect to a subcurve of $P$.

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arXiv2020

Affine invariant triangulations

We study affine invariant 2D triangulation methods. That is, methods that produce the same triangulation for a point set $S$ for any (unknown) affine transformation of $S$. Our work is based on a method by Nielson [A characterization of an affine invariant triangulation. Geom. Mod, 191-210. Springer, 1993] that uses the inverse of the covariance matrix of $S$ to define an affine invariant norm, denoted $A_{S}$, and an affine invariant triangulation, denoted ${DT}_{A_{S}}[S]$. We revisit the $A_{S}$-norm from a geometric perspective, and show that ${DT}_{A_{S}}[S]$ can be seen as a standard Delaunay triangulation of a transformed point set based on $S$. We prove that it retains all of its well-known properties such as being 1-tough, containing a perfect matching, and being a constant spanner of the complete geometric graph of $S$. We show that the $A_{S}$-norm extends to a hierarchy of related geometric structures such as the minimum spanning tree, nearest neighbor graph, Gabriel graph, relative neighborhood graph, and higher order versions of these graphs. In addition, we provide different affine invariant sorting methods of a point set $S$ and of the vertices of a polygon $P$ that can be combined with known algorithms to obtain other affine invariant triangulation methods of $S$ and of $P$.

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arXiv2020

New production matrices for geometric graphs

We use production matrices to count several classes of geometric graphs. We present novel production matrices for non-crossing partitions, connected geometric graphs, and k-angulations, which provide another way of counting the number of such objects. Counting geometric graphs is then equivalent to calculating the powers of a production matrix. Applying the technique of Riordan Arrays to these production matrices, we establish new formulas for the numbers of geometric graphs as well as combinatorial identities derived from the production matrices. Further, we obtain the characteristic polynomial and the eigenvectors of such production matrices.

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arXiv2019

Non-crossing paths with geographic constraints

A geographic network is a graph whose vertices are restricted to lie in a prescribed region in the plane. In this paper we begin to study the following fundamental problem for geographic networks: can a given geographic network be drawn without crossings? We focus on the seemingly simple setting where each region is a vertical segment, and one wants to connect pairs of segments with a path that lies inside the convex hull of the two segments. We prove that when paths must be drawn as straight line segments, it is NP-complete to determine if a crossing-free solution exists, even if all vertical segments have unit length. In contrast, we show that when paths must be monotone curves, the question can be answered in polynomial time. In the more general case of paths that can have any shape, we show that the problem is polynomial under certain assumptions.

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arXiv2019

Matching points with disks with a common intersection

We consider matchings with diametral disks between two sets of points R and B. More precisely, for each pair of matched points p in R and q in B, we consider the disk through p and q with the smallest diameter. We prove that for any R and B such that |R|=|B|, there exists a perfect matching such that the diametral disks of the matched point pairs have a common intersection. In fact, our result is stronger, and shows that a maximum weight perfect matching has this property.

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arXiv2018

A Note on Flips in Diagonal Rectangulations

Rectangulations are partitions of a square into axis-aligned rectangles. A number of results provide bijections between combinatorial equivalence classes of rectangulations and families of pattern-avoiding permutations. Other results deal with local changes involving a single edge of a rectangulation, referred to as flips, edge rotations, or edge pivoting. Such operations induce a graph on equivalence classes of rectangulations, related to so-called flip graphs on triangulations and other families of geometric partitions. In this note, we consider a family of flip operations on the equivalence classes of diagonal rectangulations, and their interpretation as transpositions in the associated Baxter permutations, avoiding the vincular patterns { 3{14}2, 2{41}3 }. This complements results from Law and Reading (JCTA, 2012) and provides a complete characterization of flip operations on diagonal rectangulations, in both geometric and combinatorial terms.

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