Embedding Ray Intersection Graphs and Global Curve Simplification

Abstract

We prove that circle graphs (intersection graphs of circle chords) can be embedded as intersection graphs of rays in the plane with polynomial-size bit complexity. We use this embedding to show that the global curve simplification problem for the directed Hausdorff distance is NP-hard. In this problem, we are given a polygonal curve $P$ and the goal is to find a second polygonal curve $P'$ such that the directed Hausdorff distance from $P'$ to $P$ is at most a given constant, and the complexity of $P'$ is as small as possible.