Polyline Simplification has Cubic Complexity

Abstract

In the classic polyline simplification problem we want to replace a given polygonal curve $P$, consisting of $n$ vertices, by a subsequence $P'$ of $k$ vertices from $P$ such that the polygonal curves $P$ and $P'$ are as close as possible. Closeness is usually measured using the Hausdorff or Fr\'echet distance. These distance measures can be applied "globally", i.e., to the whole curves $P$ and $P'$, or "locally", i.e., to each simplified subcurve and the line segment that it was replaced with separately (and then taking the maximum). This gives rise to four problem variants: Global-Hausdorff (known to be NP-hard), Local-Hausdorff (in time $O(n^3)$), Global-Fr\'echet (in time $O(k n^5)$), and Local-Fr\'echet (in time $O(n^3)$). Our contribution is as follows. - Cubic time for all variants: For Global-Fr\'echet we design an algorithm running in time $O(n^3)$. This shows that all three problems (Local-Hausdorff, Local-Fr\'echet, and Global-Fr\'echet) can be solved in cubic time. All these algorithms work over a general metric space such as $(\mathbb{R}^d,L_p)$, but the hidden constant depends on $p$ and (linearly) on $d$. - Cubic conditional lower bound: We provide evidence that in high dimensions cubic time is essentially optimal for all three problems (Local-Hausdorff, Local-Fr\'echet, and Global-Fr\'echet). Specifically, improving the cubic time to $O(n^{3-\epsilon} \textrm{poly}(d))$ for polyline simplification over $(\mathbb{R}^d,L_p)$ for $p = 1$ would violate plausible conjectures. We obtain similar results for all $p \in [1,\infty), p \ne 2$. In total, in high dimensions and over general $L_p$-norms we resolve the complexity of polyline simplification with respect to Local-Hausdorff, Local-Fr\'echet, and Global-Fr\'echet, by providing new algorithms and conditional lower bounds.