The complexity of recognizing polyhedral scenes

  • Authors:
  • Lefteris M. Kirousis;Christos H. Papadimitriou

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-

  • Venue:
  • SFCS '85 Proceedings of the 26th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science
  • Year:
  • 1985

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Abstract

Given a drawing of straight lines on the plane, we wish to decide whether it is the projection of the visible part of a set of opaque polyhedra. Although there is an extensive literature and reports on empirically succesful algorithm: for this problem, there has been no definite result concerning its complexity. In this paper we show that, rather surprisingly, this problem is NP-complete. This is true even in the relatively simple case of trihedral scenes (no four planes share a point) without shadows or cracks. Despite this negative result, we present a fast algorithm for the important special case of orthohedral scenes (all planes are perpendicular to one of the three axes) with a fixed number of "possible" objects.