In memory-constrained algorithms we have read-only access to the input, and the number of additional variables is limited. In this paper we introduce the compressed stack technique, a method that allows to transform algorithms whose space bottleneck is a stack into memoryconstrained algorithms. Given an algorithm A that runs in O(n) time using a stack of length Θ(n), we can modify it so that it runs in O(n 2 /2 s ) time using a workspace of O(s) variables (for any s ∈ o(log n)) or O(n log n/ log p) time using O(p log n/ log p) variables (for any 2 ≤ p ≤ n). We also show how the technique can be applied to solve various geometric problems, namely computing the convex hull of a simple polygon, a triangulation of a monotone polygon, the shortest path between two points inside a monotone polygon, 1-dimensional pyramid approximation of a 1-dimensional vector, and the visibility profile of a point inside a simple polygon. Our approach exceeds or matches the best-known results for these problems in constant-workspace models (when they exist), and gives a trade-off between the size of the workspace and running time. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first general framework for obtaining memory-constrained algorithms.1998 ACM Subject Classification I.3.5 Computational Geometry and Object Modeling

We investigate the concept of a median among a set of trajectories. We establish criteria that a "median trajectory" should meet, and present two different methods to construct a median for a set of input trajectories. The first method is very simple, while the second method is more complicated and uses homotopy with respect to sufficiently large faces in the arrangement formed by the trajectories. We give algorithms for both methods, analyze the worst-case running time, and show that under certain assumptions both methods can be implemented efficiently. We empirically compare the output of both methods on randomly generated trajectories, and evaluate whether the two methods yield medians that are according to our intuition. Our results suggest that the second method, using homotopy, performs considerably better.

We study five existing map construction algorithms, designed and tested with urban vehicle data in mind, and apply them to hiking trajectories with different terrain characteristics. Our main goal is to better understand the existing strategies and their limitations, in order to shed new light into the current challenges for map construction algorithms.We carefully analyze the results obtained by each algorithm focusing on the local details of the generated maps. Our analysis includes the characterization of 10 types of common artifacts, which occur in the results of more than one algorithm, and 7 algorithmic-specific artifacts, which are consequences of different algorithmic strategies. This allows us to extract systematic conclusions about the main challenges to fully automatize the construction of maps from trajectory data, to detect the strengths and weaknesses of the potential different strategies, and to suggest possible ways to design higher-quality map construction methods.We consider that this analysis will be of help for designing new and better methods that perform well in wider and more realistic contexts, not only for road map or hiking reconstruction, but also for other types of trajectory data.

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