A polynomial-time approximation scheme for the geometric unique coverage problem on unit squares

We give a polynomial-time approximation scheme for the unique unit-square coverage problem: given a set of points and a set of axis-parallel unit squares, both in the plane, we wish to find a subset of squares that maximizes the number of points contained in exactly one square in the subset. Erlebach and van Leeuwen [9] introduced this problem as the geometric version of the unique coverage problem, and the best approximation ratio by van Leeuwen [21] before our work was 2. Our scheme can be generalized to the budgeted unique unit-square coverage problem, in which each point has a profit, each square has a cost, and we wish to maximize the total profit of the uniquely covered points under the condition that the total cost is at most a given bound.