Orthogonal Terrain Guarding is NP-complete

A terrain is an x-monotone polygonal curve, i.e., successive vertices have increasing x-coordinates. Terrain Guarding can be seen as a special case of the famous art gallery problem where one has to place at most k guards on a terrain made of n vertices in order to fully see it. In 2010, King and Krohn showed that Terrain Guarding is NP-complete [SODA ’10, SIAM J. Comput. ’11] thereby solving a long-standing open question. They observe that their proof does not settle the complexity of Orthogonal Terrain Guarding where the terrain only consists of horizontal or vertical segments; those terrains are called rectilinear or orthogonal. Recently, Ashok et al. [SoCG’17] presented an FPT algorithm running in time kO(k)nO(1) for Dominating Set in the visibility graphs of rectilinear terrains without 180-degree vertices. They ask if Orthogonal Terrain Guarding is in P or NP-hard. In the same paper, they give a subexponential-time algorithm running in nO( √ n) (actually even nO( √ k)) for the general Terrain Guarding and notice that the hardness proof of King and Krohn only disproves a running time 2o(n) under the ETH. Hence, there is a significant gap between their 2O(n log n)-algorithm and the no 2o(n) ETH-hardness implied by King and Krohn’s result. In this paper, we answer those two remaining questions. We adapt the gadgets of King and Krohn to rectilinear terrains in order to prove that even Orthogonal Terrain Guarding is NP-complete. Then, we show how their reduction from Planar 3-SAT (as well as our adaptation for rectilinear terrains) can actually be made linear (instead of quadratic). 1998 ACM Subject Classification G.2.2 Graph Theory, F.2.2 Nonnumerical Algorithms and Problems