Constrained boundary labeling

Boundary labeling is a technique in computational geometry used to label sets of features in an illustration. It involves placing labels along an axis-parallel bounding box and connecting each label with its corresponding feature using non-crossing leader lines. Although boundary labeling is well-studied, semantic constraints on the labels have not been investigated thoroughly. In this paper, we introduce grouping and ordering constraints in boundary labeling: Grouping constraints enforce that all labels in a group are placed consecutively on the boundary, and ordering constraints enforce a partial order over the labels. We show that it is NP-hard to find a labeling for arbitrarily sized labels with unrestricted positions along one side of the boundary. However, we obtain polynomial-time algorithms if we restrict this problem either to uniform-height labels or to a finite set of candidate positions. Furthermore, we show that finding a labeling on two opposite sides of the boundary is NP-complete, even for uniform-height labels and finite label positions. Finally, we experimentally confirm that our approach has also practical relevance.