Homotopic Fréchet distance between curves or, walking your dog in the woods in polynomial time

Erin Wolf Chambers, Éric Colin De Verdière, Jeff Erickson, Sylvain Lazard, Francis Lazarus, Shripad Thite

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

The Fréchet distance between two curves in the plane is the minimum length of a leash that allows a dog and its owner to walk along their respective curves, from one end to the other, without backtracking. We propose a natural extension of Fréchet distance to more general metric spaces, which requires the leash itself to move continuously over time. For example, for curves in the punctured plane, the leash cannot pass through or jump over the obstacles ("trees"). We describe a polynomial-time algorithm to compute the homotopic Fréchet distance between two given polygonal curves in the plane minus a given set of polygonal obstacles.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)295-311
Number of pages17
JournalComputational Geometry: Theory and Applications
Volume43
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 2010

Keywords

  • Geodesic leash map
  • Homotopic Fréchet distance
  • Homotopy
  • Metric space
  • Punctured plane
  • Similarity of curves

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Science Applications
  • Geometry and Topology
  • Control and Optimization
  • Computational Theory and Mathematics
  • Computational Mathematics

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