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In the classic polyline simplification problem we want to replace a given polygonal curve P, consisting of n vertices, by a subsequence P' of k vertices from P such that the polygonal curves P and P' are "close". Closeness is usually measured using the Hausdorff or Fréchet distance. These distance measures can be applied globally, i.e., to the whole curves P and P', or locally, i.e., to each simplified subcurve and the line segment that it was replaced with separately (and then taking the maximum). We provide an O(n^3) time algorithm for simplification under Global-Fréchet distance, improving the previous best algorithm by a factor of Omega(kn^2). We also provide evidence that in high dimensions cubic time is essentially optimal for all three problems (Local-Hausdorff, Local-Fréchet, and Global-Fréchet). Specifically, improving the cubic time to O(n^{3-epsilon} poly(d)) for polyline simplification over (R^d,L_p) for p = 1 would violate plausible conjectures. We obtain similar results for all p in [1,infty), p != 2. In total, in high dimensions and over general L_p-norms we resolve the complexity of polyline simplification with respect to Local-Hausdorff, Local-Fréchet, and Global-Fréchet, by providing new algorithms and conditional lower bounds.
@InProceedings{bringmann_et_al:LIPIcs.SoCG.2019.18,
author = {Bringmann, Karl and Chaudhury, Bhaskar Ray},
title = {{Polyline Simplification has Cubic Complexity}},
booktitle = {35th International Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG 2019)},
pages = {18:1--18:16},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-104-7},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2019},
volume = {129},
editor = {Barequet, Gill and Wang, Yusu},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.SoCG.2019.18},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-104224},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.SoCG.2019.18},
annote = {Keywords: Polyline simplification, Fr\'{e}chet distance, Hausdorff distance, Conditional lower bounds}
}