Altitude Terrain Guarding and Guarding Uni-Monotone Polygons

Abstract: We present an optimal, linear-time algorithm for the following version of terrain guarding: given a 1.5D terrain and a horizontal line, place the minimum number of guards on the line to see all of the terrain. We prove that the cardinality of the minimum guard set coincides with the cardinality of a maximum number of witnesses'', i.e., terrain points, no two of which can be seen by a single guard. We show that our results also apply to the Art Gallery problem inmonotone mountains'', i.e., $x$-monotone polygons with a single edge as one of the boundary chains. This means that any monotone mountain is ``perfect'' (its guarding number is the same as its witness number); we thus establish the first non-trivial class of perfect polygons.