Online visibility graphs: Encoding visibility in a binary search tree

The authors present a method to compute visibility graphs that allows for online computation. The scheme uses a binary search tree to encode and store visibility relations, which can be decoded at a later stage into a visibility graph. The proposed encoder/decoder approach offers an on-line computation solution at no additional computational cost, and makes it possible to use visibility graphs for large-scale time series analysis and for applications where on-line data assimilation is required.