Compact Representation of Maximal Palindromes

Palindromes are strings that read the same forward and backward. The computation of palindromic structures within strings is a fundamental problem in string algorithms, being motivated by potential applications in formal language theory and bioinformatics. Although the number of palindromic factors in a string of length n can be quadratic, they can be implicitly represented in O(n log n) bits of space by storing the lengths of all maximal palindromes in an integer array, which can be computed in O(n) time Manacher, 1975. In this paper, we propose a novel O(n)-bit representation of all maximal palindromes in a string, which enables O(1)-time retrieval of the length of the maximal palindrome centered at any given position. The data structure can be constructed in O(n) time from the input string of length n. Since Manacher’s algorithm and the notion of maximal palindromes are widely utilized for solving numerous problems involving palindromic structures, our compact representation will accelerate the development of more space-efficient solutions to such problems. Indeed, as the first application of our compact representation of maximal palindromes, we present a data structure of size O(n) bits that can compute the longest palindrome appearing in any given factor of a string of length n in O(log n) time.