Deterministic Rectangle Enclosure and Offline Dominance Reporting on the RAM

We revisit a classical problem in computational geometry that has been studied since the 1980s: in the rectangle enclosure problem we want to report all k enclosing pairs of n input rectangles in 2D. We present the first deterministic algorithm that takes O(n logn + k) worst-case time and O(n) space in the word-RAM model. This improves previous deterministic algorithms with O((n logn+ k) log logn) running time. We achieve the result by derandomizing the algorithm of Chan, Larsen and Pătraşcu [SoCG’11] that attains the same time complexity but in expectation. The 2D rectangle enclosure problem is related to the offline dominance range reporting problem in 4D, and our result leads to the currently fastest deterministic algorithm for offline dominance reporting in any constant dimension d ≥ 4. A key tool behind Chan et al.’s previous randomized algorithm is shallow cuttings for 3D dominance ranges. Recently, Afshani and Tsakalidis [SODA’14] obtained a deterministic O(n logn)-time algorithm to construct such cuttings. We first present an improved deterministic construction algorithm that runs in O(n log logn) time in the word-RAM; this result is of independent interest. Many additional ideas are then incorporated, including a linear-time algorithm for merging shallow cuttings and an algorithm for an offline tree point location problem.