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.
@InProceedings{vanderhorst_et_al:LIPIcs.SoCG.2024.63, author = {van der Horst, Thijs and Ophelders, Tim}, title = {{Faster Fr\'{e}chet Distance Approximation Through Truncated Smoothing}}, booktitle = {40th International Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG 2024)}, pages = {63:1--63:15}, series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)}, ISBN = {978-3-95977-316-4}, ISSN = {1868-8969}, year = {2024}, volume = {293}, editor = {Mulzer, Wolfgang and Phillips, Jeff M.}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.SoCG.2024.63}, URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-200083}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.SoCG.2024.63}, annote = {Keywords: Fr\'{e}cht distance, approximation algorithms, simplification} }
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