A new fast heuristic for labeling points

In the point site labeling problem, we are given a set P={p1,p2,…,pn} of point sites in the plane. The label of a point pi is an axis-parallel rectangle of specified size. The objective is to label the maximum number of points on the map so that the placed labels are mutually non-overlapping. Here, we investigate a special class of the point site labeling problem where (i) height of the labels of all the points are same but their lengths may differ, (ii) the label of a point pi touches the point at one of its four corners, and (iii) the label of one point does not obscure any other point in P. We describe an efficient heuristic algorithm for this problem which runs in time in the worst case. We run our algorithm as well as the algorithm Rules proposed by Wagner et al. on randomly generated point sets and on the available benchmarks. The results produced by our algorithm are almost the same as Rules in most of the cases. But our algorithm is faster than Rules in dense instance. We have also computed the optimum solutions for all the examples we have considered by designing an algorithm, which performs an exhaustive search in the worst case. We found that the exhaustive search algorithm runs reasonably fast for most of the examples we have considered.