Line Segment Visibility in Simple Polygons: Exact, Robust, Scalable Computation and Applications

Abstract

The weak visibility polygon of a line segment s inside a simple polygon P, denoted by V_P(s), is the region of the polygon that is visible from at least one point on s. Given its fundamental nature in computational geometry, several algorithms have been proposed to compute weak visibility polygons efficiently, each with different trade-offs in terms of preprocessing time, query time, and space complexity. Although there are many applications that require computing these polygons such as computer graphics, robot motion planning, and network communication systems, there is a lack of any implementations of these algorithms in the literature - not to mention one that is exact, robust, and scalable. Furthermore, weak segment visibility polygons are used as basic building blocks in several other algorithms, such as in minimum-link path computation. In this work, we present an implementation of an optimal linear-time algorithm for computing the weak visibility polygon of a segment inside a triangulated simple polygon. Our implementation provides exact, robust geometric primitives and optimizations to handle large inputs with more than 18,000,000 vertices. We demonstrate two concrete applications: (1) construction of window partitions, a standard data structure in visibility algorithms, and (2) support for optimal minimum-link path queries between two points in a simple polygon, the latter serving as a direct use case of the former. Experimental results on a variety of polygon families confirm that the end-to-end running time scales linearly with the size of the polygon and is dominated by the cost of computing the triangulation, validating the practicality and scalability of the approach. The implementation is released as open source in the format of a CGAL package to support reproducibility and further research.