Boxed Permutation Pattern Matching

Given permutations T and P of length n and m, respectively, the Permutation Pattern Matching problem asks to find all m-length subsequences of T that are order-isomorphic to P. This problem has a wide range of applications but is known to be NP-hard. In this paper, we study the special case, where the goal is to only find the boxed subsequences of T that are order-isomorphic to P. This problem was introduced by Bruner and Lackner who showed that it can be solved in O(n^3) time. Cho et al. [CPM 2015] gave an O(n^2m) time algorithm and improved it to O(n^2 log m). In this paper we present a solution that uses only O(n^2) time. In general, there are instances where the output size is Omega(n^2) and hence our bound is optimal. To achieve our results, we introduce several new ideas including a novel reduction to 2D offline dominance counting. Our algorithm is surprisingly simple and straightforward to implement