The main subject of this book is the study of visibility algorithms in computational two-dimensional geometry and it is designed for graduate students and researchers in the field of computational geometry. It is also useful as a reference for researchers working in algorithms, robotics, graphics and geometric graph theory. The author is Professor of Computer Science at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, India and is a fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences.
The book provides detailed algorithms for several important visibility problems. It should be considered as a complement of other already existing books on computational geometry. While presenting an algorithm the author establishes first the geometric fundaments and properties through lemmas and theorems and then the algorithm is derived from them.
The book is clearly written and the ground geometric concepts are carefully emphasized so that the resulting algorithms can be fully understood. The book is divided into eight chapters. The first chapter provides the background material for visibility, polygons and algorithms. Each chapter from 2 to 8 deals with a specific theme of visibility. In the first sections of these chapters (Problems and Results), reviews of results on visibility problems under the theme of the respective chapter are given. In the last section (Notes and Comments) of every chapter from 2 to 8, results on parallel or on-line algorithms for the problems considered in the chapter are mentioned. In the same sections, some visibility issues connected to the theme of the respective chapter are discussed.
The book contains over 300 figures and hundreds of excercises. These are placed at suitable places within a section to allow a reader to solve them while reading that section. The subjects covered in chapters 2 to 8 are point visibility, weak and LR-visibility and shortest paths, visibility graphs and visibility graph theory, visibility and link paths, and visibility and path queries. The essential prerequisites for reading this book are courses on algorithms and data structures. The book is not meant as a first course in computational geometry. Moreover, this book can be used for assigning research projects to students and in addition it can be a natural choice for graduate-level seminar courses.

Reviewer: Oscar Bustos (Córdoba)