Reconstruction of Weakly Simple Polygons from their Edges

Given n line segments in the plane, do they form the edge set of a weakly simple polygon; that is, can the segment endpoints be perturbed by at most ε, for any ε > 0, to obtain a simple polygon? While the analogous question for simple polygons can easily be answered in O(n logn) time, we show that it is NP-complete for weakly simple polygons. We give O(n)-time algorithms in two special cases: when all segments are collinear, or the segment endpoints are in general position. These results extend to the variant in which the segments are directed, and the counterclockwise traversal of a polygon should follow the orientation. We study related problems for the case that the union of the n input segments is connected. (i) If each segment can be subdivided into several segments, find the minimum number of subdivision points to form a weakly simple polygon. (ii) If new line segments can be added, find the minimum total length of new segments that creates a weakly simple polygon. We give worst-case upper and lower bounds for both problems. 1998 ACM Subject Classification F.2.2 Nonnumerical Algorithms and Problems [Geometrical problems and computations]