Labeling Points with Rectangles of Various Shapes

Abstract

We deal with a map-abeling problem, named LOFL (Left-part Ordered Flexible Labeling), to label a set of points in a plane in the presence of polygonal obstacles. The label for each point is selected from a set of rectangles with various shapes satisfying the left-part ordered property, and is placed near to the point after scaled by a scaling factor σ which is common to all points. In this paper, we give an optimal O((n + m) log (n + m)) algorithm to decide the feasibility of LOFL for a fixed scaling factor σ, and an O((n + m) log 2 (n + m)) time algorithm to find the largest feasible scaling factor σ, where n is the number of points and m is the total number of edges of the polygonal obstacles.