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.
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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
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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
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