Computing the Similarity Between Moving Curves

In this paper we study similarity measures for moving curves which can, for example, model changing coastlines or retreating glacier termini. Points on a moving curve have two parameters, namely the position along the curve as well as time. We therefore focus on similarity measures for surfaces, specifically the Fr\'echet distance between surfaces. While the Fr\'echet distance between surfaces is not even known to be computable, we show for variants arising in the context of moving curves that they are polynomial-time solvable or NP-complete depending on the restrictions imposed on how the moving curves are matched. We achieve the polynomial-time solutions by a novel approach for computing a surface in the so-called free-space diagram based on max-flow min-cut duality

Fast Frechet Distance Between Curves With Long Edges

Computing the Fr\'echet distance between two polygonal curves takes roughly quadratic time. In this paper, we show that for a special class of curves the Fr\'echet distance computations become easier. Let $P$ and $Q$ be two polygonal curves in $\mathbb{R}^d$ with $n$ and $m$ vertices, respectively. We prove four results for the case when all edges of both curves are long compared to the Fr\'echet distance between them: (1) a linear-time algorithm for deciding the Fr\'echet distance between two curves, (2) an algorithm that computes the Fr\'echet distance in $O((n+m)\log (n+m))$ time, (3) a linear-time $\sqrt{d}$-approximation algorithm, and (4) a data structure that supports $O(m\log^2 n)$-time decision queries, where $m$ is the number of vertices of the query curve and $n$ the number of vertices of the preprocessed curve

Approximating the Packedness of Polygonal Curves

In 2012 Driemel et al. \cite{DBLP:journals/dcg/DriemelHW12} 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 $(1+\varepsilon)$-approximation algorithm for computing the Fr\'echet 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 $\mathbb{R}^d$ is $c$-packed. We present two approximation algorithms. The first algorithm is a $2$-approximation algorithm and runs in $O(dn^2 \log n)$ time. In the case $d=2$ we develop a faster algorithm that returns a $(6+\varepsilon)$-approximation and runs in $O((n/\varepsilon^3)^{4/3} polylog (n/\varepsilon)))$ 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.Comment: A preliminary version to appear in ISAAC 202

Computing a Subtrajectory Cluster from c-packed Trajectories

We present a near-linear time approximation algorithm for the subtrajectory cluster problem of $c$-packed trajectories. The problem involves finding $m$ subtrajectories within a given trajectory $T$ such that their Fr\'echet distances are at most $(1 + \varepsilon)d$, and at least one subtrajectory must be of length~$l$ or longer. A trajectory $T$ is $c$-packed if the intersection of $T$ and any ball $B$ with radius $r$ is at most $c \cdot r$ in length. Previous results by Gudmundsson and Wong \cite{GudmundssonWong2022Cubicupperlower} established an $\Omega(n^3)$ lower bound unless the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis fails, and they presented an $O(n^3 \log^2 n)$ time algorithm. We circumvent this conditional lower bound by studying subtrajectory cluster on $c$-packed trajectories, resulting in an algorithm with an $O((c^2 n/\varepsilon^2)\log(c/\varepsilon)\log(n/\varepsilon))$ time complexity

Random projections for high-dimensional curves

Modern time series analysis requires the ability to handle datasets that are inherently high-dimensional; examples include applications in climatology, where measurements from numerous sensors must be taken into account, or inventory tracking of large shops, where the dimension is defined by the number of tracked items. The standard way to mitigate computational issues arising from the high-dimensionality of the data is by applying some dimension reduction technique that preserves the structural properties of the ambient space. The dissimilarity between two time series is often measured by ``discrete'' notions of distance, e.g. the dynamic time warping, or the discrete Fr\'echet distance, or simply the Euclidean distance. Since all these distance functions are computed directly on the points of a time series, they are sensitive to different sampling rates or gaps. The continuous Fr\'echet distance offers a popular alternative which aims to alleviate this by taking into account all points on the polygonal curve obtained by linearly interpolating between any two consecutive points in a sequence. We study the ability of random projections \`a la Johnson and Lindenstrauss to preserve the continuous Fr\'echet distance of polygonal curves by effectively reducing the dimension. In particular, we show that one can reduce the dimension to $O(\epsilon^{-2} \log N)$, where $N$ is the total number of input points while preserving the continuous Fr\'echet distance between any two determined polygonal curves within a factor of $1\pm \epsilon$. We conclude with applications on clustering.Comment: 22 page

A fast implementation of near neighbors queries for Fr\'echet distance (GIS Cup)

This paper describes an implementation of fast near-neighbours queries (also known as range searching) with respect to the Fr\'echet distance. The algorithm is designed to be efficient on practical data such as GPS trajectories. Our approach is to use a quadtree data structure to enumerate all curves in the database that have similar start and endpoints as the query curve. On these curves we run positive and negative filters to narrow the set of potential results. Only for those trajectories where these heuristics fail, we compute the Fr\'echet distance exactly, by running a novel recursive variant of the classic free-space diagram algorithm. Our implementation won the ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS Cup 2017.Comment: ACM SIGSPATIAL'17 invited paper. 9 page