Guarding Polyominoes Under k-Hop Visibility

We study the Art Gallery Problem under k-hop visibility in polyominoes. In this visibility model, two unit squares of a polyomino can see each other if and only if the shortest path between the respective vertices in the dual graph of the polyomino has length at most k. In this paper, we show that the VC dimension of this problem is 3 in simple polyominoes, and 4 in polyominoes with holes. Furthermore, we provide a reduction from Planar Monotone 3Sat, thereby showing that the problem is NP-complete even in thin polyominoes (i.e., polyominoes that do not a contain a \(2\times 2\) block of cells). Complementarily, we present a linear-time 4-approximation algorithm for simple 2-thin polyominoes (which do not contain a \(3\times 3\) block of cells) for all \(k\in {\mathbb {N}}\).