Orthogonal Terrain Guarding is NP-complete

Abstract: A terrain is an x-monotone polygonal curve, i.e., successive vertices have increasing x-coordinates. Terrain Guarding can be seen as a special case of the famous art gallery problem where one has to place at most $k$ guards on a terrain made of $n$ vertices in order to fully see it. In 2010, King and Krohn showed that Terrain Guarding is NP-complete [SODA '10, SIAM J. Comput. '11] thereby solving a long-standing open question. They observe that their proof does not settle the complexity of Orthogonal Terrain Guarding where the terrain only consists of horizontal or vertical segments; those terrains are called rectilinear or orthogonal. Recently, Ashok et al. [SoCG'17] presented an FPT algorithm running in time $k^{O(k)}n^{O(1)}$ for Dominating Set in the visibility graphs of rectilinear terrains without 180-degree vertices. They ask if Orthogonal Terrain Guarding is in P or NP-hard. In the same paper, they give a subexponential-time algorithm running in $n^{O(\sqrt n)}$ (actually even $n^{O(\sqrt k)}$) for the general Terrain Guarding and notice that the hardness proof of King and Krohn only disproves a running time $2^{o(n^{1/4})}$ under the ETH. Hence, there is a significant gap between their $2^{O(n^{1/2} \log n)}$-algorithm and the no $2^{o(n^{1/4})}$ ETH-hardness implied by King and Krohn's result. In this paper, we adapt the gadgets of King and Krohn to rectilinear terrains in order to prove that even Orthogonal Terrain Guarding is NP-complete. Then, we show how to obtain an improved ETH lower bound of $2^{\Omega(n^{1/3})}$ by refining the quadratic reduction from Planar 3-SAT into a cubic reduction from 3-SAT. This works for both Orthogonal Terrain Guarding and Terrain Guarding.