Voronoi Diagram of Polygonal Chains under the Discrete Fr\'echet Distance

Abstract

Polygonal chains are fundamental objects in many applications like pattern recognition and protein structure alignment. A well-known measure to characterize the similarity of two polygonal chains is the famous Fr\`{e}chet distance. In this paper, for the first time, we consider the Voronoi diagram of polygonal chains in $d$-dimension ($d=2,3$) under the discrete Fr\`{e}chet distance. Given $n$ polygonal chains ${\cal C}$ in $d$-dimension ($d=2,3$), each with at most $k$ vertices, we prove fundamental properties of such a Voronoi diagram {\em VD}$_F({\cal C})$ by presenting the first known upper and lower bounds for {\em VD}$_F({\cal C})$.