Title
Consistent Simplification of Polyline Tree Bundles
Abstract
The Polyline Bundle Simplification (PBS) problem is a generalization of the classical polyline simplification problem. Given a set of polylines, which may share line segments and points, PBS asks for the smallest consistent simplification of these polylines with respect to a given distance threshold. Here, consistent means that each point is either kept in or discarded from all polylines containing it. In previous work, it was proven that PBS is NP-hard to approximate within a factor of n(1/3) -epsilon for any epsilon > 0 where n denotes the number of points in the input. This hardness result holds even for two polylines. In this paper we first study the practically relevant setting of planar inputs. While for many combinatorial optimization problems the restriction to planar settings makes the problem substantially easier, we show that the inapproximability bound known for general inputs continues to hold even for planar inputs. We proceed with the interesting special case of PBS where the polylines form a rooted tree. Such tree bundles naturally arise in the context of movement data visualization. We prove that optimal simplifications of these tree bundles can be computed in O(n(3)) for the Frechet distance and in O(n(2)) for the Hausdorff distance (which both match the computation time for single polylines). Furthermore, we present a greedy heuristic that allows to decompose polyline bundles into tree bundles in order to make our exact algorithm for trees useful on general inputs. The applicability of our approaches is demonstrated in an experimental evaluation on real-world data.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1007/978-3-030-89543-3_20
COMPUTING AND COMBINATORICS (COCOON 2021)
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Polyline simplification, Hardness of approximation, Tree graph, Dynamic program, Planarity
Conference
13025
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0302-9743
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yannick Bosch100.34
Peter Schäfer200.34
Joachim Spoerhase311214.12
Sabine Storandt418428.65
Johannes Zink511.35