Related papers: On the complexity of optimal homotopies
Measuring the similarity of curves is a fundamental problem arising in many application fields. There has been considerable interest in several such measures, both in Euclidean space and in more general setting such as curves on Riemannian…
We prove the first polynomial bound on the number of monotonic homotopy moves required to tighten a collection of closed curves on any compact orientable surface, where the number of crossings in the curve is not allowed to increase at any…
We describe a $O(\log n )$-approximation algorithm for computing the homotopic \Frechet distance between two polygonal curves that lie on the boundary of a triangulated topological disk. Prior to this work, algorithms were known only for…
In this paper, we study the problem of computing a homotopy from a planar curve $C$ to a point that minimizes the area swept. The existence of such a minimum homotopy is a direct result of the solution of Plateau's problem. Chambers and…
We provide an efficient algorithm to compute the minimum area of a homotopy between two closed plane curves, given that they divide the plane into finite number of regions. For any positive real number $\varepsilon>0$, we construct a closed…
We consider drawings of graphs in the plane in which vertices are assigned distinct points in the plane and edges are drawn as simple curves connecting the vertices and such that the edges intersect only at their common endpoints. There is…
The optimal transport problem has many applications in machine learning, physics, biology, economics, etc. Although its goal is very clear and mathematically well-defined, finding its optimal solution can be challenging for large datasets…
We present a homotopic approach to solving challenging, optimization-based motion planning problems. The approach uses Homotopy Optimization, which, unlike standard continuation methods for solving homotopy problems, solves a sequence of…
Calculating and categorizing the similarity of curves is a fundamental problem which has generated much recent interest. However, to date there are no implementations of these algorithms for curves on surfaces with provable guarantees on…
In this paper, we develop a novel {\bf ho}moto{\bf p}y {\bf s}moothing (HOPS) algorithm for solving a family of non-smooth problems that is composed of a non-smooth term with an explicit max-structure and a smooth term or a simple…
Homotopy methods are attractive due to their capability of solving difficult optimisation and optimal control problems. The underlying idea is to construct a homotopy, which may be considered as a continuous (zero) curve between the…
We consider the relations between different measures of complexity for free homotopy classes of curves on a surface $\Sigma$, including the minimum number of self-intersections, the minimum length of the words representing them in a…
We consider the following problem for a fixed graph H: given a graph G and two H-colorings of G, i.e. homomorphisms from G to H, can one be transformed (reconfigured) into the other by changing one color at a time, maintaining an H-coloring…
For a given graph $G$, a "hopset" $H$ with hopbound $\beta$ and stretch $\alpha$ is a set of edges such that between every pair of vertices $u$ and $v$, there is a path with at most $\beta$ hops in $G \cup H$ that approximates the distance…
Let $S$ be a complete flat surface, such as the Euclidean plane. We determine the homeomorphism class of the space of all curves on $S$ which start and end at given points in given directions and whose curvatures are constrained to lie in a…
We consider the complexity of finding weighted homomorphisms from intersection graphs of curves (string graphs) with $n$ vertices to a fixed graph $H$. We provide a complete dichotomy for the problem: if $H$ has no two vertices sharing two…
The goal of Point Distance Solving Problems is to find 2D or 3D placements of points knowing distances between some pairs of points. The common guideline is to solve them by a numerical iterative method (\emph{e.g.} Newton-Raphson method).…
Deciding whether two simplicial complexes are homotopy equivalent is a fundamental problem in topology, which is famously undecidable. There exists a combinatorial refinement of this concept, called simple-homotopy equivalence: two…
We investigate the following problem: Given two embeddings G_1 and G_2 of the same abstract graph G on an orientable surface S, decide whether G_1 and G_2 are isotopic; in other words, whether there exists a continuous family of embeddings…
The geometric intersection number of a curve on a surface is the minimal number of self-intersections of any homotopic curve, i.e. of any curve obtained by continuous deformation. Given a curve $c$ represented by a closed walk of length at…