Expressiveness and complexity of regular pure two-dimensional context-free languages

Picture languages generalize classical string languages to two-dimensional arrays. Several approaches have been proposed during the years; consequently, a general classification and a detailed comparison of the proposed classes turn to be necessary. In this paper, we study some closure properties of (regularly controlled) pure two-dimensional context-free grammars, for which we also prove that the parsing is NP-hard. Moreover, we draw some comparisons with other interesting picture grammars like (regional) tile grammars, Prusa grammars and local languages, clarifying, in some cases, their mutual relationship with respect to expressiveness.