427. Construct Quad Tree
¶
Problem
Given a n * n matrix grid of 0's and 1's only. We want to represent grid with a Quad-Tree.
Return the root of the Quad-Tree representing grid.
A Quad-Tree is a tree data structure in which each internal node has exactly four children. Besides, each node has two attributes:
val: True if the node represents a grid of 1's or False if the node represents a grid of 0's. Notice that you can assign thevalto True or False whenisLeafis False, and both are accepted in the answer.isLeaf: True if the node is a leaf node on the tree or False if the node has four children.
class Node {
public boolean val;
public boolean isLeaf;
public Node topLeft;
public Node topRight;
public Node bottomLeft;
public Node bottomRight;
}
We can construct a Quad-Tree from a two-dimensional area using the following steps:
- If the current grid has the same value (i.e all
1'sor all0's) setisLeafTrue and setvalto the value of the grid and set the four children to Null and stop. - If the current grid has different values, set
isLeafto False and setvalto any value and divide the current grid into four sub-grids as shown in the photo. - Recurse for each of the children with the proper sub-grid.

If you want to know more about the Quad-Tree, you can refer to the wiki.
Quad-Tree format:
You don't need to read this section for solving the problem. This is only if you want to understand the output format here. The output represents the serialized format of a Quad-Tree using level order traversal, where null signifies a path terminator where no node exists below.
It is very similar to the serialization of the binary tree. The only difference is that the node is represented as a list [isLeaf, val].
If the value of isLeaf or val is True we represent it as 1 in the list [isLeaf, val] and if the value of isLeaf or val is False we represent it as 0.
Example 1:

Input: grid = [[0,1],[1,0]] Output: [[0,1],[1,0],[1,1],[1,1],[1,0]] Explanation: The explanation of this example is shown below: Notice that 0 represents False and 1 represents True in the photo representing the Quad-Tree.![]()
Example 2:

Input: grid = [[1,1,1,1,0,0,0,0],[1,1,1,1,0,0,0,0],[1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1],[1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1],[1,1,1,1,0,0,0,0],[1,1,1,1,0,0,0,0],[1,1,1,1,0,0,0,0],[1,1,1,1,0,0,0,0]] Output: [[0,1],[1,1],[0,1],[1,1],[1,0],null,null,null,null,[1,0],[1,0],[1,1],[1,1]] Explanation: All values in the grid are not the same. We divide the grid into four sub-grids. The topLeft, bottomLeft and bottomRight each has the same value. The topRight have different values so we divide it into 4 sub-grids where each has the same value. Explanation is shown in the photo below:![]()
Constraints:
n == grid.length == grid[i].lengthn == 2xwhere0 <= x <= 6