New results on stabbing segments with a polygon

Abstract. We consider a natural variation of the concept of stabbing a segment by a simple polygon: a segment is stabbed by a simple polygon P if at least one of its two endpoints is contained in P. A segment set S is stabbed by P if every segment of S is stabbed by P. We show that if S is a set of pairwise disjoint segments, the problem of computing the minimum perimeter polygon stabbing S can be solved in polynomial time. We also prove that for general segments the problem is NP-hard. Further, an adaptation of our polynomial-time algorithm solves an open problem posed by Löffler and van Kreveld [Algorithmica 56(2), 236–269 (2010)] about finding a maximum perimeter convex hull for a set of imprecise points modeled as line segments.