Paper detail

Revisiting the Fréchet distance between piecewise smooth curves

Since its introduction to computational geometry by Alt and Godau in 1992, the Fréchet distance has been a mainstay of algorithmic research on curve similarity computations. The focus of the research has been on comparing polygonal curves, with the notable exception of an algorithm for the decision problem for planar piecewise smooth curves due to Rote (2007). We present an algorithm for the decision problem for piecewise smooth curves that is both conceptually simpler and naturally extends to the first algorithm for the problem for piecewise smooth curves in $\mathbb{R}^d$. We assume that the algorithm is given two continuous curves, each consisting of a sequence of $m$, resp.\ $n$, smooth pieces, where each piece belongs to a sufficiently well-behaved class of curves, such as the set of algebraic curves of bounded degree. We introduce a decomposition of the free space diagram into a controlled number of pieces that can be used to solve the decision problem similarly to the polygonal case, in $O(mn)$ time, leading to a computation of the Fréchet distance that runs in $O(mn\log(mn))$ time. Furthermore, we study approximation algorithms for piecewise smooth curves that are also $c$-packed for some fixed value $c$. We adapt the existing framework for $(1+ε)$-approximations and show that an approximate decision can be computed in $O(cn/ε)$ time for any $ε> 0$.