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Walking your dog in the woods in polynomial time

  • Erin Wolf Chambers
  • , Éric Colin De Verdière
  • , Jeff Erickson
  • , Bylvain Lazard
  • , Francis Lazarus
  • , Shripad Ihite

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

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 obstacles, which are either points or polygons.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 24th Annual Symposium on Computational Geometry 2008, SCG'08
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages101-109
Number of pages9
ISBN (Print)9781605580715
DOIs
StatePublished - 2008
Event24th Annual Symposium on Computational Geometry, SCG'08 - College Park, MD, United States
Duration: Jun 9 2008Jun 11 2008

Publication series

NameProceedings of the Annual Symposium on Computational Geometry

Other

Other24th Annual Symposium on Computational Geometry, SCG'08
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityCollege Park, MD
Period6/9/086/11/08

Keywords

  • Geodesic leash map
  • Homotopic fréchet distance

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • Geometry and Topology
  • Computational Mathematics

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