The Fréchet Distance Unleashed: Approximating a Dog with a Frog

Abstract

We show that a minor variant of the continuous Fr\'echet distance between polygonal curves can be computed using essentially the same algorithm used to solve the discrete version, thus dramatically simplifying the algorithm for computing it. The new variant is not necessarily monotone, but this shortcoming can be easily handled via refinement. Combined with a Dijkstra/Prim type algorithm, this leads to a realization of the Fr\'echet distance (i.e., a morphing) that is locally optimal (aka locally correct), that is both easy to compute, and in practice, takes near linear time on many inputs. The new morphing has the property that the leash is always as short-as-possible. We implemented the new algorithm, and developed various strategies to get a fast execution in practice. Among our new contributions is a new simplification strategy that is distance-sensitive, and enables us to compute the exact continuous Fr\'echet distance in near linear time in practice. We preformed extensive experiments on our new algorithm, and released \texttt{Julia} and \texttt{Python} packages with these new implementations.