Abstract
Block sorting is used in connection with optical character recognition (OCR). Recent work has focused on finding good strategies which perform well in practice. Block sorting is \(\mathcal{NP}\)-hard and all of the previously known heuristics lack proof of any approximation ratio. We present here an approximation algorithm for the block sorting problem with approximation ratio of 2 and run time O(n 2). The approximation algorithm is based on finding an optimal sequence of absolute block deletions.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bafna, V., Pevzner, P.A.: Sorting by transposition. SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics 11, 224–240 (1998)
Bafna, V., Pevzner, P.A.: Genome rearrangements and sorting by reversals. SIAM Journal on Computing 25, 272–289 (1999)
Bein, W.W., Larmore, L.L., Latifi, S., Sudborough, I.H.: Block sorting is hard. International Journal of Foundations of Computer Science 14(3), 425–437 (2003)
Caprara, A.: Sorting by reversals is difficult. In: Proceedings 1st Conference on Computational Molecular Biology, pp. 75–83. ACM, New York (1997)
Gates, W.H., Papadimitriou, C.H.: Bounds for sorting by prefix reversal. Discrete Mathematics 27, 47–57 (1979)
Gobi, R., Latifi, S., Bein, W.W.: Adaptive sorting algorithms for evaluation of automatic zoning employed in OCR devices. In: Proceedings of the 2000 International Conference on Imaging Science, Systems, and Technology, pp. 253–259. CSREA Press (2000)
Heath, L.S., Vergara, J.P.C.: Sorting by bounded block-moves. Discrete Applied Mathematics 88, 181–206 (1998)
Heath, L.S., Vergara, J.P.C.: Sorting by short block-moves. Algorithmics 28(3), 323–354 (2000)
Heydari, H., Sudborough, I.H.: On the diameter of the pancake network. Journal of Algorithms 25(1), 67–94 (1997)
Kanai, J., Rice, S.V., Nartker, T.A.: Automatic evaluation of OCR zoning. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 17(1), 86–90 (1995)
Latifi, S.: How can permutations be used in the evaluation of automatic zoning evaluation. In: ICEE 1993. Amir Kabir University (1993)
Mahajan, M., Rama, R., Raman, V., Vijayakumar, S.: Approximate block sorting. International Journal of Foundations of Computer Science (to appear)
Mahajan, M., Rama, R., Vijayakumar, S.: Merging and sorting by strip moves. In: Pandya, P.K., Radhakrishnan, J. (eds.) FSTTCS 2003. LNCS, vol. 2914, pp. 314–325. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Bein, W.W., Larmore, L.L., Morales, L., Sudborough, I.H. (2005). A Faster and Simpler 2-Approximation Algorithm for Block Sorting. In: Liśkiewicz, M., Reischuk, R. (eds) Fundamentals of Computation Theory. FCT 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3623. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11537311_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11537311_11
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-28193-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-31873-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)