Representing Directed Trees as Straight Skeletons

Abstract: The straight skeleton of a polygon is the geometric graph obtained by tracing the vertices during a mitered offsetting process. It is known that the straight skeleton of a simple polygon is a tree, and one can naturally derive directions on the edges of the tree from the propagation of the shrinking process. In this paper, we ask the reverse question: Given a tree with directed edges, can it be the straight skeleton of a polygon? And if so, can we find a suitable simple polygon? We answer these questions for all directed trees where the order of edges around each node is fixed.