Fréchet Distance for Uncertain Curves

A trajectory is a sequence of time-stamped locations. Measurement uncertainty is an important factor to consider when analysing trajectory data. We define an uncertain trajectory as a trajectory where at each time stamp the true location lies within an uncertainty region—a disk, a line segment, or a set of points. In this paper we consider discrete and continuous Fréchet distance between uncertain trajectories. We show that finding the largest possible discrete or continuous Fréchet distance among all possible realisations of two uncertain trajectories is NP-hard under all the uncertainty models we consider. Furthermore, computing the expected discrete or continuous Fréchet distance is #P-hard when the uncertainty regions are modelled as point sets or line segments. We also study the setting with time bands, where we restrict temporal alignment of the two trajectories, and give polynomial-time algorithms for largest possible and expected discrete and continuous Fréchet distance for uncertainty regions modelled as point sets.

keywords: Computational Geometry, Data Imprecision, Trajectories

Conference Proceedings (peer-reviewed)

Aleksandr Popov, Benjamin Raichel, Chenglin Fan, Kevin Buchin, Maarten Löffler, Marcel Roeloffzen
Fréchet Distance for Uncertain Curves
Proc. 47th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming
168, 20:1–20:20, 2020
https://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2020/12427

Workshop or Poster (weakly reviewed)

Aleksandr Popov, Kevin Buchin, Maarten Löffler, Marcel Roeloffzen
Fréchet Distance Between Uncertain Trajectories: Computing Expected Value and Upper Bound
Proc. 36st European Workshop on Computational Geometry
3:1–8, 2020

Archived Publication (not reviewed)

Aleksandr Popov, Benjamin Raichel, Chenglin Fan, Kevin Buchin, Maarten Löffler, Marcel Roeloffzen
Fréchet Distance for Uncertain Curves
2004.11862, 2020
http://arXiv.org/abs/2004.11862

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