Distance Bounds for High Dimensional Consistent Digital Rays and 2-D Partially-Consistent Digital Rays

We consider the problem of digitalizing Euclidean segments. Specifically, we look for a constructive method to connect any two points in ℤ^d. The construction must be consistent (that is, satisfy the natural extension of the Euclidean axioms) while resembling them as much as possible. Previous work has shown asymptotically tight results in two dimensions with Θ(log N) error, where resemblance between segments is measured with the Hausdorff distance, and N is the L₁ distance between the two points. This construction was considered tight because of a Ω(log N) lower bound that applies to any consistent construction in ℤ². In this paper we observe that the lower bound does not directly extend to higher dimensions. We give an alternative argument showing that any consistent construction in d dimensions must have Ω(log^{1/(d-1)} N) error. We tie the error of a consistent construction in high dimensions to the error of similar weak constructions in two dimensions (constructions for which some points need not satisfy all the axioms). This not only opens the possibility for having constructions with o(log N) error in high dimensions, but also opens up an interesting line of research in the tradeoff between the number of axiom violations and the error of the construction. In order to show our lower bound, we also consider a colored variation of the concept of discrepancy of a set of points that we find of independent interest.