Space Efficient Two-Dimensional Orthogonal Colored Range Counting

Abstract: In the two-dimensional orthogonal colored range counting problem, we preprocess a set, $P$, of $n$ colored points on the plane, such that given an orthogonal query rectangle, the number of distinct colors of the points contained in this rectangle can be computed efficiently. For this problem, we design three new solutions, and the bounds of each can be expressed in some form of time-space tradeoff. By setting appropriate parameter values for these solutions, we can achieve new specific results with (the space are in words and $\epsilon$ is an arbitrary constant in $(0,1)$): ** $O(n\lg^3 n)$ space and $O(\sqrt{n}\lg^{5/2} n \lg \lg n)$ query time; ** $O(n\lg^2 n)$ space and $O(\sqrt{n}\lg^{4+\epsilon} n)$ query time; ** $O(n\frac{\lg^2 n}{\lg \lg n})$ space and $O(\sqrt{n}\lg^{5+\epsilon} n)$ query time; ** $O(n\lg n)$ space and $O(n^{1/2+\epsilon})$ query time. A known conditional lower bound to this problem based on Boolean matrix multiplication gives some evidence on the difficulty of achieving near-linear space solutions with query time better than $\sqrt{n}$ by more than a polylogarithmic factor using purely combinatorial approaches. Thus the time and space bounds in all these results are efficient. Previously, among solutions with similar query times, the most space-efficient solution uses $O(n\lg^4 n)$ space to answer queries in $O(\sqrt{n}\lg^8 n)$ time (SIAM. J. Comp.~2008). Thus the new results listed above all achieve improvements in space efficiency, while all but the last result achieve speed-up in query time as well.