Let π(a,b) denote the shortest path between two points a, b inside a simple polygon P, which totally lies in P. The geodesic distance between a and b in P is defined as the length of π(a,b), denoted by gd(a,b), in contrast with the Euclidean distance between a and b in the plane, denoted by d(a,b). Given two disjoint polygons P and Q in the plane, the bridge problem asks for a line segment (optimal bridge) that connects a point p on the boundary of P and a point q on the boundary of Q such that the sum of three distances gd(p′,p), d(p,q) and gd(q,q′), with any p′ ∈ P and any q′ ∈ Q, is minimized. We present an O(n log 3 n) time algorithm for finding an optimal bridge between two simple polygons. This significantly improves upon the previous O(n2) time bound. Our result is obtained by making substantial use of a hierarchical structure that consists of segment trees, range trees and persistent search trees, and a structure that supports dynamic ray shooting and shortest path queries as well.
Selectable Heaps and Optimal Lazy Search Trees
