English

On strictly output sensitive color frequency reporting

Computational Geometry 2026-03-13 v1

Abstract

Given a set of nn colored points PRdP \subset \mathbb{R}^d we wish to store PP such that, given some query region QQ, 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 QQ are axis-aligned boxes or dominance ranges. If QQ contains kk colors, the main goal is to achieve ``strictly output sensitive'' query time O(f(n)+k)O(f(n) + k). Firstly, we show that, for every s{2,,n}s \in \{ 2, \dots, n \}, there exists a simple O(nslogsn)O(ns\log_s n) size data structure for points in R2\mathbb{R}^2 that allows frequency reporting queries in O(logn+klogsn)O(\log n + k\log_s n) time. Secondly, we give a lower bound for the weighted version of the problem in the arithmetic model of computation, proving that with O(m)O(m) space one can not achieve query times better than Ω(ϕlog(n/ϕ)log(m/n))\Omega\left(\phi \frac{\log (n / \phi)}{\log (m / n)}\right), where ϕ\phi 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 O(n(sϕ)εlogsn)O(n(s \phi)^\varepsilon \log_s n). Finally, we give an O(n1+ε+mlogn+K)O(n^{1+\varepsilon} + m \log n + K)-time algorithm that can answer mm dominance queries R2\mathbb{R}^2 with total output complexity KK, while using only linear working space.

Keywords

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}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:16:40.570Z