# Homotopic Fréchet Distance Between Curves or, Walking Your Dog in the Woods in Polynomial Time

4 VEGAS - Effective Geometric Algorithms for Surfaces and Visibility
INRIA Lorraine, LORIA - Laboratoire Lorrain de Recherche en Informatique et ses Applications
Abstract : The Fréchet distance between two curves in the plane is the minimum length of a leash that allows a dog and its owner to walk along their respective curves, from one end to the other, without backtracking. We propose a natural extension of Fréchet distance to more general metric spaces, which requires the leash itself to move continuously over time. For example, for curves in the punctured plane, the leash cannot pass through or jump over the obstacles (trees''). We describe a polynomial-time algorithm to compute the homotopic Fréchet distance between two given polygonal curves in the plane minus a given set of polygonal obstacles.
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Journal articles

Cited literature [31 references]

https://hal.inria.fr/inria-00438463
Contributor : Sylvain Lazard <>
Submitted on : Thursday, December 3, 2009 - 4:58:14 PM
Last modification on : Thursday, November 19, 2020 - 1:01:06 PM

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### Citation

Erin Wolf Chambers, Eric Colin de Verdière, Jeff Erickson, Sylvain Lazard, Francis Lazarus, et al.. Homotopic Fréchet Distance Between Curves or, Walking Your Dog in the Woods in Polynomial Time. Computational Geometry, Elsevier, 2010, Special Issue on 24th Annual Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG'08), 43 (3), pp.295-311. ⟨10.1016/j.comgeo.2009.02.008⟩. ⟨inria-00438463⟩

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