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Recognizing polygons, or how to spy

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Abstract

A new class of so-called pseudo-starshaped polygons is introduced. A polygon is pseudo-star-shaped if there exists a point from which the whole interior of the polygon can be seen, provided it is possible to see through single edges. We show that the class of pseudo-star-shaped polygons unifies and generalizes the well-known classes of convex, monotone and pseudostar-sphaped polygons. We give algorithms for testing whether a polygon is pseudostar-shaped from a given point in linear time, and for constructing all regions from which the polygon is pseudo-star-shaped in quadratic time. We show the latter algorithm to be worst-case optimal. Also, we give efficient algorithms solving standard geometrical problems such as point-location and triangulation for pseudo-starshaped polygons.

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Research for this paper was done while the author was at Carleton University

Research for this paper was done in part while the author was visiting Carleton University

This research was supported in part by NSERC and by Carleton University

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Dean, J.A., Lingas, A. & Sack, JR. Recognizing polygons, or how to spy. The Visual Computer 3, 344–355 (1988). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01901192

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