Stabbing Segments with Rectilinear Objects

Abstract

Given a set of n line segments in the plane, we say that a region R of the plane is a stabber if R contains exactly one end point of each segment of the set. In this paper we provide efficient algorithms for determining wheter or not a stabber exists for several shapes of stabbers. Specially, we consider the case in which the stabber can be described as the intersecction of isothetic halfplanes (thus the stabbers are halfplanes, strips, quadrants, 3-sided rectangles, or rectangles). We provided efficient algorithms reporting all combinatorially different stabbers of the shape. The algorithms run in O(n) time (for the halfplane case), O(n logn) time (for strips and quadrants), O(n^2) (for 3-sided rectangles), or O(n^3) time (for rectangles).