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In 2012 Driemel et al. [Anne Driemel et al., 2012] introduced the concept of c-packed curves as a realistic input model. In the case when c is a constant they gave a near linear time (1+ε)-approximation algorithm for computing the Fréchet distance between two c-packed polygonal curves. Since then a number of papers have used the model.
In this paper we consider the problem of computing the smallest c for which a given polygonal curve in ℝ^d is c-packed. We present two approximation algorithms. The first algorithm is a 2-approximation algorithm and runs in O(dn² log n) time. In the case d = 2 we develop a faster algorithm that returns a (6+ε)-approximation and runs in O((n/ε³)^{4/3} polylog (n/ε))) time.
We also implemented the first algorithm and computed the approximate packedness-value for 16 sets of real-world trajectories. The experiments indicate that the notion of c-packedness is a useful realistic input model for many curves and trajectories.
@InProceedings{gudmundsson_et_al:LIPIcs.ISAAC.2020.9,
author = {Gudmundsson, Joachim and Sha, Yuan and Wong, Sampson},
title = {{Approximating the Packedness of Polygonal Curves}},
booktitle = {31st International Symposium on Algorithms and Computation (ISAAC 2020)},
pages = {9:1--9:15},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-173-3},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2020},
volume = {181},
editor = {Cao, Yixin and Cheng, Siu-Wing and Li, Minming},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ISAAC.2020.9},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-133530},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.ISAAC.2020.9},
annote = {Keywords: Computational geometry, trajectories, realistic input models}
}