LIPIcs.SoCG.2024.63.pdf
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The Fréchet distance is a popular distance measure for curves. Computing the Fréchet distance between two polygonal curves of n vertices takes roughly quadratic time, and conditional lower bounds suggest that even approximating to within a factor 3 cannot be done in strongly-subquadratic time, even in one dimension. The current best approximation algorithms present trade-offs between approximation quality and running time. Recently, van der Horst et al. (SODA, 2023) presented an O((n²/α) log³ n) time α-approximate algorithm for curves in arbitrary dimensions, for any α ∈ [1, n]. Our main contribution is an approximation algorithm for curves in one dimension, with a significantly faster running time of O(n log³ n + (n²/α³) log²n log log n). Additionally, we give an algorithm for curves in arbitrary dimensions that improves upon the state-of-the-art running time by a logarithmic factor, to O((n²/α) log² n). Both of our algorithms rely on a linear-time simplification procedure that in one dimension reduces the complexity of the reachable free space to O(n²/α) without making sacrifices in the asymptotic approximation factor.
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