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Computing The Largest Empty Rectangle, B. Chazelle, R. L. Drysdale, D. T. Lee
Computing The Largest Empty Rectangle, B. Chazelle, R. L. Drysdale, D. T. Lee
Dartmouth Scholarship
We consider the following problem: Given a rectangle containing N points, find the largest area subrectangle with sides parallel to those of the original rectangle which contains none of the given points. If the rectangle is a piece of fabric or sheet metal and the points are flaws, this problem is finding the largest-area rectangular piece which can be salvaged. A previously known result [13] takes $O(N^2 )$ worst-case and $O(N\log ^2 N)$ expected time. This paper presents an $O(N\log ^3 N)$ time, $O(N\log N)$ space algorithm to solve this problem. It uses a divide-and-conquer approach similar to the ones …