Graphs with large obstacle numbers

  • Authors:
  • Padmini Mukkamala;János Pach;Deniz Sariöz

  • Affiliations:
  • Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Piscataway, NJ;Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne;The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, New York, NY

  • Venue:
  • WG'10 Proceedings of the 36th international conference on Graph-theoretic concepts in computer science
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Motivated by questions in computer vision and sensor networks, Alpert et al. [3] introduced the following definitions. Given a graph G, an obstacle representation of G is a set of points in the plane representing the vertices of G, together with a set of connected obstacles such that two vertices of G are joined by an edge if an only if the corresponding points can be connected by a segment which avoids all obstacles. The obstacle number of G is the minimum number of obstacles in an obstacle representation of G. It was shown in [3] that there exist graphs of n vertices with obstacle number at least Ω(√logn). We use extremal graph theoretic tools to show that (1) there exist graphs of n vertices with obstacle number at least Ω(n/log2 n), and (2) the total number of graphs on n vertices with bounded obstacle number is at most 2o(n2). Better results are proved if we are allowed to use only convex obstacles or polygonal obstacles with a small number of sides.