Multi-Sided Boundary Labeling
Kindermann, Philipp, Benjamin Niedermann, Ignaz Rutter, Schaefer, Marcus, Schulz, André, Wolff, A Alexander · 2016
In the Boundary Labeling problem, we are given a set of n points, referred to as sites, inside an axis-parallel rectangle R, and a set of n pairwise disjoint rectangular labels that are attached to R from the outside. The task is to connect the sites to the labels by non-intersecting rectilinear paths, so-called leaders, with at most one bend. In this paper, we study the Multi-Sided Boundary Labeling problem, with labels lying on at least two sides of the enclosing rectangle. We present a polynomial-time algorithm that computes a crossing-free leader layout if one exists. So far, such an algorithm has only been known for the cases that labels lie on one side or on two opposite sides of R (where a crossing-free solution always exists). For the more difficult case where labels lie on adjacent sides, we show how to compute crossing-free leader layouts that maximize the number of labeled points or minimize the total leader length. 1