Dynamic Convex Hulls for Simple Paths

We consider the planar dynamic convex hull problem. In the literature, solutions exist supporting the insertion and deletion of points in poly-logarithmic time and various queries on the convex hull of the current set of points in logarithmic time. If arbitrary insertion and deletion of points are allowed, constant time updates and fast queries are known to be impossible. This paper considers two restricted cases where worst-case constant time updates and logarithmic time queries are possible. We assume all updates are performed on a deque (double-ended queue) of points. The first case considers the monotonic path case, where all points are sorted in a given direction, say horizontally left-to-right, and only the leftmost and rightmost points can be inserted and deleted. The second case assumes that the points in the deque constitute a simple path. Note that the monotone case is a special case of the simple path case. For both cases, we present solutions supporting deque insertions and deletions in worst-case constant time and standard queries on the convex hull of the points in $O(\log n)$ time, where $n$ is the number of points in the current point set. The convex hull of the current point set can be reported in $O(h+\log n)$ time, where $h$ is the number of edges of the convex hull. For the 1-sided monotone path case, where updates are only allowed on one side, the reporting time can be reduced to $O(h)$, and queries on the convex hull are supported in $O(\log h)$ time. All our time bounds are worst case. In addition, we prove lower bounds that match these time bounds, and thus our results are optimal. For a quick comparison, the previous best update bounds for the simple path problem were amortized $O(\log n)$ time by Friedman, Hershberger, and Snoeyink [SoCG 1989].