On strictly output sensitive color frequency reporting
Abstract
Given a set of colored points we wish to store such that, given some query region , we can efficiently report the colors of the points appearing in the query region, along with their frequencies. This is the \emph{color frequency reporting} problem. We study the case where query regions are axis-aligned boxes or dominance ranges. If contains colors, the main goal is to achieve ``strictly output sensitive'' query time . Firstly, we show that, for every , there exists a simple size data structure for points in that allows frequency reporting queries in time. Secondly, we give a lower bound for the weighted version of the problem in the arithmetic model of computation, proving that with space one can not achieve query times better than , where is the number of possible colors. This means that our data structure is near-optimal. We extend these results to higher dimensions as well. Thirdly, we present a transformation that allows us to reduce the space usage of the aforementioned datastructure to . Finally, we give an -time algorithm that can answer dominance queries with total output complexity , while using only linear working space.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2603.11898,
title = {On strictly output sensitive color frequency reporting},
author = {Erwin Glazenburg and Frank Staals},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.11898},
year = {2026}
}