Optimally cutting a surface into a disk

  • Authors:
  • Jeff Erickson;Sariel Har-Peled

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign;University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the eighteenth annual symposium on Computational geometry
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

We consider the problem of cutting a set of edges on a polyhedral manifold surface, possibly with boundary, to obtain a single topological disk, minimizing either the total number of cut edges or their total length. We show that this problem is NP-hard, even for manifolds without boundary and for punctured spheres. We also describe an algorithm with running time n O(g+k), where n is the combinatorial complexity, g is the genus, and k is the number of boundary components of the input surface. Finally, we describe a greedy algorithm that outputs a O(log2 g)-approximation of the minimum cut graph in O(g 2 n log n) time.