On the Generalized Fréchet Distance

and its Applications

Theodor Gutschlag Sabine Storandt
University Konstanz University Konstanz
Konstanz, Germany Konstanz, Germany
theodor.gutschlag@uni-konstanz.de sabine.storandt@uni-konstanz.de

Figure 1: In the �rst plot on the left, two curves that are similar in their spatial and temporal progression are shown. In the
second plot, the curves are similar in space but not in time. In the third plot, the temporal course is similar, but not the spatial
course. In the fourth, both the spatial and temporal curves di�er signi�cantly. We introduce a new distance measure, based on
the framework of the Fréchet distance, which considers both, spatial and temporal information, and allows to combine them
as desired for the application.

ABSTRACT individual weighting of each dimension on the similarity value by

Measuring the similarity of spatio-temporal trajectories in a sen-
sible fashion is an important building block for applications such
as trajectory clustering or movement pattern analysis. However,
typically employed similarity measures only take the spatial com-
ponents of the trajectory into account, or are complicated combi-
nations of di�erent measures. In this paper we introduce the so
called Generalized Fréchet distance, which extends the well-known
Fréchet distance. For two polygonal curves of length = and < in
3-dimensional space, the Generalized Fréchet distance enables an
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For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s).
SIGSPATIAL ’22, November 1–4, 2022, Seattle, WA, USA
© 2022 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-9529-8/22/11.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3557915.3560970
using a convex function. This allows to integrate arbitrary data
dimensions as e.g. temporal information in an elegant, �exible
and application-aware manner. We study the Generalized Fréchet
Distance for both the discrete and the continuous version of the
problem, prove useful properties, and present e�cient algorithms
to compute the decision and optimization problem. In particular,
we prove that for 3 2 O (1) the asymptotic running times of the op-
timization problem for the continuous version are O (=< log(=<))
under realistic assumptions, and O (=<) for the discrete version for
arbitrary weight functions. Therefore the theoretical running times
match those of the classical Fréchet distance. In our experimen-
tal evaluation, we demonstrate the usefulness of the Generalized
Fréchet distance and study the practical behaviour of our algorithms.
On sets of real-world trajectories, we con�rm that the weighting
of the spatial and temporal dimensions heavily impacts the rela-
tive similarity, and hence the ability to tailor the measure to the
application is a useful tool.
SIGSPATIAL ’22, November 1–4, 2022, Sea�le, WA, USA
CCS CONCEPTS
• Theory of computation ! Computational geometry.
KEYWORDS
Trajectory similarity, Fréchet distance, Algorithm analysis
ACM Reference Format:
Theodor Gutschlag and Sabine Storandt. 2022. On the Generalized Fréchet
Distance and its Applications. In The 30th International Conference on Ad-
vances in Geographic Information Systems (SIGSPATIAL ’22), November 1–4,
2022, Seattle, WA, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 10 pages. https://doi.org/
10.1145/3557915.3560970
1 INTRODUCTION
The Fréchet distance is a popular and widely used distance measure
for polygonal curves with use cases in di�erent �elds of compu-
tation such as computational geometry [1], computer vision [6],
data compression [23], or protein alignment [24]. Informally, the
Fréchet distance is the minimum length of a leash required for a
dog, walking along one of the polygonal curves, to always stay
connected to its owner, who is walking along the other polygonal
curve. Thereby, dog and owner are not allowed to backtrack.
As the Fréchet distance takes the location and ordering of the
points along the curves into account (while other measures as e.g.
the Hausdor� distance ignore this aspect), it constitutes a very use-
ful measure particularly for the similarity of movement trajectories.
It is hence frequently applied for tasks as map matching [4, 13],
clustering [9, 21] or trajectory simpli�cation [25]. Although tra-
jectories are often spatio-temporal in nature, most previous work
only takes the spatial components into account when utilizing the
Fréchet distance [26]. If temporal aspects are considered, either
completely di�erent measures are deployed [32] or the Fréchet dis-
tance is merely used as a building block of a more complex measure
[20, 34]. Nevertheless, in theory, the Fréchet distance is capable of
incorporating temporal or other additional data dimensions, as its
de�nition can easily be lifted to work in 3-dimensional Euclidean
space. But the problem incurred by this approach is that all dimen-
sions are treated equally when determining the minimum leash
length (e.g. by using some norm on the 3-dimensional points). Of-
ten, though, di�erent data dimensions come e.g. with di�erent data
ranges, di�erent levels of uncertainty, or di�erent levels of impor-
tance for the result. Hence the uniform weighting of all dimensions
is quite limiting, might lead to undesirable results, and impairs the
interpretability of the outcome. While some of these issues could
be alleviated with the help of normalization or data transformation,
there is still a lack of �exibility when it comes to choosing the best
distance measure for a given data set.
The goal of this paper is to overcome this problem by proposing
a new version of the classical Fréchet distance, called Generalized
Fréchet distance, in which the contribution of each dimension to the
output value can be tuned as desired. We show that this increased
�exibility does not come at the cost of higher asymptotic running
times, and we discuss several application scenarios for which the
usage of the Generalized Fréchet distance is bene�cial.
Theodor Gutschlag and Sabine Storandt
1.1 Related Work
Since its introduction in 1906, many variants and extensions of the
Fréchet distance were proposed to suit di�erent kinds of applica-
tions.
For example, in [15], the Fréchet distance was instrumented
to determine the similarity of time series. To capture the possible
interdependence of data points in time series data, they augemented
the Fréchet distance with a dissimilarity index which takes temporal
correlation into account.
There are also Fréchet distance variants for trajectory compari-
son that are sensitive to polygonal obstacles. For example, when
using the geodesic Fréchet distance [17], the leash length is deter-
mined by the shortest obstacle-aware path in the plane between the
position of the dog and the owner (that means, the leash has to bend
around the obstacles). The homotopic Fréchet distance [11] demands
the leash to move continuously over time, that means, it cannot
jump over obstacles. Both, geodesic and homotopic Fréchet dis-
tance can be computed in polynomial time. For the isotopic Fréchet
distance [12], a special case of the homotopic Fréchet distance,
where homotopies are replaced by ambient isotopies, no e�cient
algorithms are known so far.
While in most use cases of the Fréchet distance only two-di-
mensional data is considered, applications on higher dimensional
curves have also been investigated. For example, the alignment of
tertiary protein structures using the discrete Fréchet distance in three
dimensions was discussed in various papers [24, 35]. In [3], four-
dimensional lung movement data was analysed using the Fréchet
distance with the goal of detecting lung cancer or tumour displace-
ment. In the context of general data clustering and analysis, nearest
neighbour data structures for high-dimensional point sequences
under the Fréchet metric were studied in [22], and multivariate
time series were compared using the Fréchet distance in [28].
Somewhat surprisingly, little work was done so far on utilizing
the Fréchet distance for the analysis of higher dimensional move-
ment trajectory data. While the (discrete) Fréchet distance is very
frequently applied to measure the similarity of the movement shape
in the plane, the temporal component is usually not incorporated.
A notable exception is the F-constrained discrete Fréchet distance
[18], which only allows the leash to connect two points on the two
curves if their timestamps are within a given time window F. How-
ever, the measure is not suitable for continuous curves and very
sensitive to the choice of F. In [7], the Fréchet distance was studied
in R3 under polyhedral distance functions and it was shown that
the measures can then be computed in quadratic time. They also
rely on convexity considerations in their analysis. However, they
restrict themselves to a subset of norms while we allow arbitrary
combinations of convex functions.
There exist various other similarity measures that can be applied
to spatio-temporal trajectories, as (multi-dimensional) Dynamic
Time Warping (DTW) [2, 30], the Lock-Step Euclidean distance [33],
as well as variants of Edit distance [14] or Longest Common Subse-
quence [31]. In a recent survey [29], these measures were compared
to the Fréchet distance under theoretical and practical aspects. One
drawback of those measures is that not all can be applied to contin-
uous curves. Continuous DTW and LCSS versions exist but either
su�er from huge running times or do not work for the !2 norm
On the Generalized Fréchet Distance and its Applications
[5, 8]. Another issue is that in contrast to the Fréchet distance,
DTW and most others are not metric. The survey also discusses
applications where the spatial and the temporal components should
not equally contribute to the (dis)similarity of two trajectories and
hence more �exibility in the weighting would be desirable.
1.2 Contribution
The following theoretical and experimental results on multi-di-
mensional trajectory similarity computation are presented in this
paper: We introduce the (discrete) Generalized Fréchet distance,
as a generalization of the classical (discrete) Fréchet distance, this
allows to customize the contribution of each data dimension to the
distance value. If the contribution of each dimension is modelled
by a di�erentiable convex function, we prove that the concept of
free space diagrams introduced in [1] can be adapted such that the
Generalized Fréchet distance can be computed within the same as-
ymptotic running time bound as the classical Fréchet distance. For
the discrete Generalized Fréchet distance, we show that the dynamic
programming approach for the conventional discrete Fréchet dis-
tance can be integrated with the individual function choices for each
dimension. The applicability of the Generalized Fréchet distance
is demonstrated in an experimental study on real-world spatio-
temporal trajectories and generated curves with three-dimensional
data points. We describe implementation details and engineering
techniques that enable sensible running times, and study the impact
of the choice of the mapping function on the distance value.
2 PRELIMINARIES
In this section, we review basic de�nitions and algorithms for the
classical (discrete) Fréchet distance, which the Generalized Fréchet
distance will be built upon.
Given two points 0, 1 2 R3 , their Euclidean distance is denoted
by 3 (0, 1). We use 01 to describe the line segment from 0 to 1, and
01 for the line passing through 0, 1. A polygonal curve is described
by a sequence of = points and the corresponding = 1 line segments
connecting successive points. More formally, let S3 be the set of all
sequences of 3-dimensional points ( = hB 0, . . . , B= i where ( (8) = B8
for all 8 2 [=] with [=] = {0, 1, 2, ..., =} for any = 2 N. Then the
following de�nition of a (continuous) polygonal curve applies.
De�nition 2.1 (Polygonal Curve). Given a sequence ( 2 S3 with =
points, a polygonal curve is a continuous mapping % : [0, =] ! R3 ,
where % (8) = B8 for 8 2 [=] and % (8 + _) = _(B8+1 B8 ) + B8 for
_ 2 [0, 1]. The length of % is then denoted by =.
We refer to the set of all polygonal curves in 3 dimensions as
P3 . Unless stated otherwise, we will always assume for ease of
exposition that 3 2 O (1) in the following. This complies with the
fact that in most applications we deal with low-dimensional data,
e.g., spatio-temporal trajectories are typically three-dimensional
with two spatial and one temporal dimension, or four-dimensional
with three spatial and one temporal dimension (in case elevation
matters).
2.1 Continuos Fréchet Distance
The continuous Fréchet distance measures the maximum distance
between two polygonal curves while traversing them in parallel
SIGSPATIAL ’22, November 1–4, 2022, Sea�le, WA, USA
without backtracking. Any such traversal can be modelled by a so
called reparameterisation.
De�nition 2.2 (Reparameterisation). Given % 2 P3 of length
< as well as = 2 N 2 , a continuous non-decreasing surjective
function U : [0, =] ! [0, <] with U (0) = 0 and U (=) = < is called a
reparametrisation of %.
The set of all such functions U is denoted by =,< .
De�nition 2.3 (Fréchet Distance). Let %, & 2 P3 be two polygonal
curves of length = and <, then the Fréchet distance is de�ned as
3 (%, &) = inf max 3 (% (C)), & (U (C))).
U2 =,< C 2 [0,=]
Alt and Godau [1] introduced several algorithms to e�ciently
compute the Fréchet distance of two polygonal curves % and &.
Their algorithms rely on answering the respective decision problem
as a subroutine: Given two curves and Y, does there exist reparameter-
isations such that 3 (%, &)  Y? The algorithms then systematically
search for the smallest value Y for which the answer to the decision
problem is true.
Free Space Diagram. To answer the decision problem, the concept
of a free space diagram was introduced in [1]. In case the given
curves %, & 2 P = are both of length two, i.e. both consist of a single
line segment, all pairs of points whose distance is at most Y de�ne
the free space
Y = {(B, C) 2 [0, 1] 2 3 (% (B), & (C))  Y}.
Alt and Godau showed that Y is always a convex set. The concept
can be extended to polygonal curves of arbitrary length by applying
the free space de�nition to each pair of line segments from % and
&. Accordingly, the free space diagram
Y (%, &) = {(B, C) 2 [0, =] ⇥ [0, <] 3 (% (B), & (C))  Y}
is composed of the =< cells ⇠8,9 where Y (%, &)\⇠8,9 corresponds to
the free space of the 8th line segment of % and the 9th line segment
of &. Given the free space diagram Y (%, &), the decision problem
can be answered based on the observation that 3 (%, &)  Y i�
there exists a continuous curve in Y (%, &) from (0, 0) to (=, <),
which is monotone in both coordinates.
For (8, 9) 2 [=] ⇥ [<] let !8,9 (or ⌫8,9 ) be the left (or bottom)
line segment bounding cell ⇠8,9 (see Figure 2 for an illustration).
Further de�ne !8,9 = !8,9 \ Y and ⌫8,9 = ⌫8,9 \ Y . Two things
follow from the convexity of Y \ ⇠8,9 . First, !8,9 and ⌫8,9 are line
segments, and secondly, it is su�cient to calculate all !8,9 and ⌫8,9
to decide whether there exists a a path in the corresponding free
space diagram. Let now 'Y be the set of points that are reachable
from (0, 0), that is, the points on monotone curve from (0, 0) in
Y . Further let !8,9 = !8,9 \ 'Y and ⌫8,9 = ⌫8,9 \ 'Y . Because of
' '
the convexity of Y \ ⇠8,9 , !8,9
' and ⌫ ' are line segments as well
8,9
and 3 (%, &)  Y i� (=, <) 2 !=+1,<
' . Note that !8,9 and ⌫8,9 can be
computed in constant time using basic geometric operations.
Based on these considerations, the question whether 3 (%, &) 
Y can be answered in time O (=<) by �rst computing all intervals of
the free space on the boundary of all cells in the free space diagram
and then systematically testing for each cell whether its right upper
corner is reachable from (0, 0).
SIGSPATIAL ’22, November 1–4, 2022, Sea�le, WA, USA
Figure 2: Intervals of free space on the boundary of a cell.
Computing the Fréchet Distance. Having developed a black box
for answering the decision version of the problem, Alt and Godau
presented two algorithms that systematically search for the small-
est value of Y such that 3 (%, &)  Y holds. At the heart of both
algorithms is the observation, that there is only a discrete set of Y
values that need to be tested.
• ���� �: The distance between the starting points or the end-
points of the two curves, that is, 3 (% (0), & (0)) or 3 (% (=), & (<)).
• ���� �: The distance of a sequence point of one curve to a
line segment of the other.
• ���� �: The common distance of two sequence points of one
curve to the intersection point of their bisector with some
line segment of the other.
Figure 3 shows an example of two polygonal curves and the re-
spective free space diagram for a Y of ���� �. There are two values
of ���� �, =< + =< of ���� � and possibly =2 < + <2 = of ����
�, overall resulting in O (= 2< + < 2=) so called critical values. Note
that each of the critical values can be computed in O (1) with basic
geometric operations.
Accordingly, the Fréchet distance can be computed in O ((= 2< +
2 segments. With that, the concept of parallel traversal of two se-
< =) log(=<)) by computing all critical values, sorting them, and
then conducting a binary search algorithm to detect the smallest
critical value for which the answer to the decision problem is true.
Alt and Godau where able to further decrease the asymptotic
runtime by applying parametic search [27], speci�cally Cole’s vari-
ant [16]. The goal is to reduce the running time for computing
critical values of ���� �, since this dominates the running time
of the binary search algorithm. First, they compute the so called
critical interval [Y 1, Y 2 ], which is the result of conducting binary
search only on values of ���� � and ���� �. So if a critical value
of ���� � is the solution, it must be within [Y 1, Y 2 ]. Let 08,9 , 18,9 be
Theodor Gutschlag and Sabine Storandt
Figure 3: Two curves %, & and the corresponding free space
diagram for Y = 3 (%, &). A possible path through the free
space diagram is shown in red. Note that Y is of ���� �.
the end points of line segment !8,9 and 28,9 , 38,9 of ⌫8,9 modelled as
functions in Y. Then values of ���� � can be described as: 08,9 = 1:,9
or 28,9 = 38,: for some 8, 9, :. Since 08,9 , 18,9 , 28,9 , 38,9 are functions of
constant degree, a comparison between two of them requires to
check only a constant number of critical values. There are O (=<)
functions to check which by using parametric search is possible
within O (=< log(=<)), which also constitutes the overall running
time.
2.2 Discrete Fréchet Distance
The discrete variant of the Fréchet distance is only concerned with
point sequences in S3 and does not consider the connecting line
quences can be de�ned as follows.
De�nition 2.4 (Traversal). Let ', ( 2 S3 be two sequences of
length =, <. A traversal V of ' and ( is a sequence of point pairs
(A, B) 2 ' ⇥ ( that starts with (A 0, B 0 ), ends with (A= , B< ); and a pair
(A8 , B 9 ) in V can only be followed only by one of (A8+1, B 9 ), (A8 , B 9+1 ),
or (A8+1, B 9+1 ).
The discrete Fréchet distance between two sequences then is the
maximum distance between pair of points in V, minimized over all
possible traversals.
On the Generalized Fréchet Distance and its Applications SIGSPATIAL ’22, November 1–4, 2022, Sea�le, WA, USA

De�nition 2.5 (Discrete Fréchet Distance). Given two sequences P����. Let %, &, ' 2 P3 . By de�nition of g and the minimality
', ( 2 S3 . The discrete Fréchet distance is de�ned as 33 (', () = of U 2 =,< , we get 3 GF (%, &) = 0 , % = &. Since g is a norm it
minV max (A,B) 2V 3 (A, B). follows, that 3 GF (%, &) = 3 GF (&, %). It remains to be shown, that
3 GF (%, &)  3 GF (%, ') + 3 GF (', &). Now let Y > 0 and W, ` 2 ,
The discrete structure enables the computation of 33 (', () in
such that 3 GF (%, ') = XW (%, ') and 3 GF (', &) = X ` (', &). Then
O (=<) by applying the concept of dynamic programming [19].
XW (%, ') < 3 GF (%, ') + Y/3
3 GENERALIZED FRÉCHET DISTANCE
and
The idea of the (discrete) Generalized Fréchet distance is to create
a bottleneck distance measure, where every dimension of the input X ` (', &) < 3 GF (', &) + Y/3.
data can be modelled individually and can be arbitrarily combined Further, there exists a CY 2 [0, 1], such that (i):
with the other dimensions as desired for the application. The char-
acteristics of the Fréchet distance are to be retained: sensitivity to g (% (CY ) & (W (` (CY )))) > max g (% (C) (& (W (` (C)))) Y/3
C 2 [0,1]
backtracking, being a metric and allowing for e�cient computation.
We will prove these properties for the continuous and the discrete Let W (CY ) = DY and ` (DY ) = E Y , then:
version, and also examine the relation between the continuous and g (% (CY ) '(DY )) < 3 GF (%, ') + Y/3
the discrete variant.
g ('(DY ) & (E Y )) < 3 GF (', &) + Y/3
Let us start with the following basic de�nition, which is needed
for both variants: By adding the above equations we get:
De�nition 3.1 (Weight Function). Let be the set of all di�er-
3 2Y
g (% (CY ) '(DY )) + g ('(DY ) & (E Y )) < 3 GF (%, ') + 3 GF (', &) +
entiable and convex functions g : R3 ! R+0 for which g (G) = 0 , 3
G = 0 applies for all G 2 R3 . Since g is norm and therefore ful�ls the triangle inequality, we
obtain:
3.1 Continous Generalized Fréchet Distance 2Y
First, we introduce the continuous Generalized Fréchet distance g (% (CY ) & (E Y )) < 3 GF (%, ') + 3 GF (', &) + .
3
and prove that it de�nes a norm on P3 for a g 2 3 if g is a metric
Reorganizing and (i) results:
on R3 , which is important for many applications. We further show
that it can be computed within the same asymptotic running time max g (% (C) (& (EC )) Y < 3 GF (%, ') + 3 GF (', &).
C 2 [0,1]
bounds as the classical Fréchet distance.
Since Y is arbitrary and W and ` are minimal 3 GF (%, &)  3 GF (%, ') +
De�nition 3.2 (Generalized Fréchet Distance). Let g 2 3 be arbi-
3 GF (', &) follows. ⇤
trary but �xed. Then the weighted distance of %, & 2 P3 of length
=, < for a given reparametrisation U 2 =,< is de�ned as: Next, we want to design an algorithm to compute the Generalized
XU (%, &) := max g (% (C) & (U (C))) Fréchet distance for any feasible choice of g. In the following, we
C 2 [0,=]
argue that the concept of the free space diagram can be generalized
Accordingly, the Generalized Fréchet distance of % and & is to work also for the Generalized Fréchet distance. To get the same
3 GF (?, @) := inf XU (%, &). asymptotic running times for the Generalized Fréchet distance
U
as for computing the classical Fréchet distance, we need to show
For example, if we set that all critical values as well as !8,9
⌫ and ! ⌫ can be determined in
q 8,9
constant time.
g= G 12 + G 22 + G 32
Now let g 2 3 be arbitrary but �xed and Y 2 R>0 . The de�nition
for 3 = 3, we would have the classical Fréchet distance using the of the free space can be generalized as follows.
Euclidean norm in three dimensions. But we can also set e.g.
q De�nition 3.4 (Free Space). We call
g = G 12 + G 22 + G 32 g
Y = {(B, C) 2 [0, =] ⇥ [0, <] g (% (B) & (C))  Y}
to re�ect that for the two �rst (spatial) data dimensions, the Eu-
clidean distance is sensible, but the third data dimension (e.g. time) the free space of %, & 2 P3 under Y and g.
should be treated di�erently. Hence the �exibility in de�ning a A necessary condition for answering the decision problem based
suitable measure for a given application is signi�cantly increased. on the free space diagram is that for curves of length two the free
Given this generalized de�nition of the Fréchet distance, we next space is convex.
investigate its properties and how it can be computed e�ciently.
We start by proving that the Generalized Fréchet distance still L���� 3.5 (C��������). Let %, & 2 P3 be of length two, then Y
constitutes a metric when the weight function is di�erentiable and is convex.
convex.
P����. Let _ 2 [0, 1] and (B, C), (G, ~) 2 Y . We will show that
L���� 3.3 (M����� S����). If g 2 3 is a norm on R3 , then
(P3 , 3 GF ) is a metric space. _(B, C) + (1 _)(G, ~) = (_B + (1 _)G, _C + (1 _)~) 2 Yg ,
SIGSPATIAL ’22, November 1–4, 2022, Sea�le, WA, USA
hence, g (% (_B + (1 _)G) & (_C + (1 _)~))  Y. W.l.o.g. assume
g (% (B) & (C)) g (% (G) & (~)). By the de�nition of a polygonal
curve and the convexity of g, we get:
g (_(% (B) & (C)) + (1 _)(% (G) & (~)))
_g (% (B) & (C)) + (1 _)g (% (G) & (~)))
g (% (B) & (C))  Y
⇤ =< 2 ) log(=<)).
To show that !8,9 and ⌫8,9 are computable in O (1), we reduce the
problem to one variable and then obtain the value by solving a one
dimensional equation. Let ', ( 2 S3 be of length =, < and let %, &
be the corresponding polygonal curves. Then !8,9 is the interval of
the line segment ( ( 9)( ( 9 + 1), 9 2 [< 1] which has a distance of
at most Y from the point '(8), 8 2 [=]. Due to Lemma 3.5, the set of
these points is a line segment, which means we only need to �nd
the endpoints of this line segment to de�ne !8,9 . In 3-dimensional
Euclidean space a line DE can be written as C (E D) + D with C 2 R.
Solving g ('(8) C · (( ( 9 + 1) ( ( 9)) + ( ( 9)) = Y allows �nding
the endpoints ; 1, ; 2 . Since g is convex, at most two solutions exist.
Now !8,9 = ; 1; 2 \ ( ( 9)( ( 9 + 1). The computation of ⌫8,9 works in
analogues fashion. Hence !8,9 and ⌫8,9 can be computed in O (1).
T������ 3.6. Let %, & 2 P = . Then 3 GF (%, &)  Y can be decided
in O (=<) for arbitrary but �xed g 2 3 .
Now, in order to compute the Generalized Fréchet distance, we
need to calculate the critical values of ���� �, ���� � and ���� �
in time O (1) each. This is trivial for values of ���� �, as we only
need to check the distance between the starting and the end points
of the two curves. For the calculation of the critical values of ����
� and ���� � we apply the same approach as for the calculation of
!8,9 , ⌫8,9 . That is, we reduce the problem to one variable and then
obtain the value by solving a one dimensional equation. Again, let
', ( 2 S3 of length =, < and let %, & be the corresponding polygonal
curves. Critical values of ���� � correspond to the distance from
'(8), 8 2 [=] to 1 9 2 ( ( 9)( ( 9 + 1), 9 2 [< 1], such that
min g ('(;) G) = g ('(8) 19)
G 2( ( 9)( ( 9+1)
(or from ( ( 9), 9 2 [<] to '(8)'(8 + 1) , 8 2 [= 1]). Since g is convex
and ( ( 9)( ( 9 + 1) is a bounded set, there exists one minimum. By
de�nition all g are di�erentiable, hence solving
g 0 ('(8) C (( ( 9 + 1) ( ( 9)) + ( ( 9)) = 0
returns a C such that C (( ( 9 + 1) ( ( 9)) + ( ( 9) = 1 9 . Accordingly,
computing critical values of ���� � is in O (1).
Critical values of ���� �, are the common weighted distance of
two points '(8 1 ), '(8 2 ), 8 1, 8 2 2 [=] to a line segment ( ( 9)( ( 9 + 1)
with 9 2 [< 1] (or ( ( 91 ), ( ( 92 ), 91, 92 2 [<] to a line segment
'(8)'(8 + 1) with 8 2 [= 1]). Let
⌘(G) = g ('(G) C (( ( 9 + 1) ( ( 9)) + ( ( 9)),
then solving ⌘(8 1 ) ⌘(8 2 ) = 0 for C results in C 1, C 2 , since we are
again solving a one dimensional convex function. If C 1 (( ( 9 + 1)
( ( 9)) +( ( 9) 2 ( ( 9)( ( 9 +1) or C 2 (( ( 9 +1) ( ( 9)) +( ( 9) 2 ( ( 9)( ( 9 +1),
we add the weighted distance from '(8) to this point to the list of
Theodor Gutschlag and Sabine Storandt
critical values of ���� �. Hence also computing a critical value of
���� � is in O (1).
Since all types of critical values can be computed in O (1), the
optimization problem can be solved in O ((= 2< + =< 2 ) log(=<)) by
a binary search over the respective value set.
T������ 3.7. Let %, & 2 P3 be two polygonal curves of length
=, < and g 2 3 . Then 3 GF (%, &) can be computed in O ((= 2< +
To also make the parametric search algorithm from Alt and
Godau applicable to the computation of 3 GF , the end points 08,9 , 18,9
and 28,9 , 38,9 of the line segments !8,9 and ⌫8,9 , respectively, must be
de�nable as a functions in Y. Rearranging
g ('(8) C (( ( 9 + 1) ( ( 9)) + ( ( 9))) = Y
for C 2 R results in the respective functions in Y for 08,9 and 18,9 .
Similarly, we can de�ne the functions for 28,9 and 38,9 .
T������ 3.8 (C��������� O����������� P������). Let %, & 2
P3 be two polygonal curves of length =, < and g 2 3 . If 08,9 , 18,9 , 28,9 , 38,9
can be described as functions of constant degree for all 8 2 [=], 9 2
[<], then 3 GF (%, &) can be computed in O (=< log(=<)).
3.2 Discrete Generalized Fréchet Distance
Similar to the extended de�nition of the continuous Fréchet dis-
tance, we now de�ne the discrete generalized version.
De�nition 3.9 (Discrete Generalized Fréchet Distance). Let g 2 3
be arbitrary but �xed. Further let ', ( 2 S3 be point sequences and
V a traversal of ' and (. The discrete weighted distance between '
and ( of traversal V is de�ned as :
X V (', () := max g (B8 C 9 ).
(B8 ,C 9 ) 2V
The discrete Generalized Fréchet distance of ' and ( is de�ned as
3 dGF (', () := inf V X V (', ().
Based on the same argumentation as used in the proof of Lemma
3.3, we obtain the following result for the discrete Generalized
Fréchet distance.
L���� 3.10 (M����� S����). (S3 , 3 dGF ) if g 2 3 is a norm.
The de�nition of a traversal is una�ected by the distance measure
used. But it is important to note, that we can still divide the prob-
lem into independent sub-problems in the same way as it is done
for the classical discrete Fréchet distance. Therefore we can solve
the discrete Generalized Fréchet distance using the same dynamic
programming approach as for the conventional discrete Fréchet
distance, only using the new distance de�nition internally. Thus
we obtain the following theorem.
T������ 3.11. Let ', ( 2 S3 be of length =, < and g 2 3 . Then
3 dGF (', () can be computed in O (=<).
3.3 Relationship
In the conventional and also in our generalized variant, the discrete
Fréchet distance can be computed asymptotically faster and with
simpler machinery than the continuous variant. However, the con-
tinuous variant is often deemed superior as it also takes the course
On the Generalized Fréchet Distance and its Applications
of the curve between the points into account, while the discrete
variant ’jumps’ from point to point. Hence the question is how
much information is lost in the discretized variant.
Next we want to assess the gap between the discrete and the
continuous Generalized Fréchet distance. For given ', ( 2 S3 with
%, & being their polygonal curves, we have 3 GF (%, &)  3 dGF (', ()
as we can de�ne a reparametrisation U, such that, for each (A8 , B 9 ) 2
V there exists a C 2 [0, =] such that % (C) = A8 and & (U (C)) = B 9 . To
get a more �ne-grained distinction, we de�ne
⇡ (() := max g (B8 1 B8 )
8=2,...,=
for ( = hB 1, . . . , B= i 2 S3 .
L���� 3.12. Given ', ( 2 S3 , their polygon curves %, & and
g 2 3 , then
3 dGF (', ()  3 GF (%, &) + max{⇡ ('), ⇡ (()}/2.
if g is a norm over R3 .
P����. Let V be a traversal such that X V (', () is minimal. Further,
let U be a reparametrisation such XU (%, &) is minimal. Now assume
we are at traversal step V2 = ('(8), ( ( 9)). We have to distinguish
between three cases for V2+1 :
First, let V2+1 = ('(8 + 1), ( ( 9)), let C8+1
⇣ be the smallest C such⌘
that % (C) = '(8 + 1) then & (U (C8+1 )) 2 ,
( ( 9 1)+( ( 9) ( ( 9)+( (8+1)
2 2
as otherwise V or U would not be optimal. Due to the triangle
inequality, we get:
g ('(8 + 1) ( ( 9))  g (% (C8+1 ) & (U (C8+1 ))) + max{⇡ ('), ⇡ (()}/2.
The same applies for the case V2+1 = ('(8), ( ( 9 + 1)).
In case V2+1 = ('(8 + 1), ( ( 9 + 1)), we again choose C8+1 to be the
smallest ) such
⇣ that % (C) = '(8 + 1). Since
⌘ V and U are optimal so
( ( 9)+( ( 9+1) ( ( 9+1)+( (8+2)
& (U (C8+1 )) 2 2 , 2 , otherwise V2+1 < ('(8 +
1), ( ( 9 + 1)). We hence have
g ('(8+1) ( ( 9 +1))  g (% (C8+1 ) & (U (C8+1 )))+max{⇡ ('), ⇡ (()}/2,
. Thus the assertion follows.
Hence 3 GF (?, @)  3 dGF (', ()  3 GF (%, &)+max{⇡ ('), ⇡ (()}/2
if the chosen g is a norm over R3 .
4 SHOWCASE: SPATIO-TEMPORAL
TRAJECTORY SIMILARITY
In this section we apply the Generalized Fréchet distance to deter-
mine the similarity of three-dimensional trajectories. In previous
work, typically the Fréchet distance was only used on the spatial
dimensions of the trajectories. Here, we also incorporate the tem-
poral dimension and show that tuning the in�uence of the third
dimension heavily impacts the outcome.
4.1 Implementation
Although the parametric search algorithm proposed by Alt and Go-
dau has a better asymptotic runtime than the simpler binary search
algorithm, it was already noted in the original paper that the former
is based on data structures that are hard to implement and that
come with large computational overhead. Hence, in practice, the
simpler algorithm is preferable. However, a naive implementation
SIGSPATIAL ’22, November 1–4, 2022, Sea�le, WA, USA
of this algorithm for the Generalized Fréchet distance is rather slow
and might exhibit some numerical instabilities. In the following,
we describe some ideas to take care of these problems.
Solving the equations to compute !8,9 , ⌫8,9 as well as the critical
values T��� � and T��� � results in long and unwieldy formulas. In
order to avoid handling these, we use a numerical equation solver1 .
To decrease the practical running time, we seek to reduce the
number of critical values for which we need to answer the respec-
tive decision problem, in particular those of ���� �. Like in the
parametric search algorithm, we construct a critical interval [Y 1, Y 2 ],
based on the critical values of ���� � and ���� �. Note that there are
possibly a lot of duplicates in values of ���� �, which we remove
beforehand. Next, we test if Y 2 r solves the decision problem for
r > 0 being negligibly small. If the decision problem is false, then
we assume the Y 2 is the optimum, otherwise there exists a value of
���� � in [Y 1, Y 2 ], for which the decision problem is positive. Since
we already computed the critical interval we can directly discard
all values of ���� � which are not in the critical interval.
4.2 Scalability and Sensitivity Study
Next, we evaluate the practical running times of the Generalized
Fréchet distance and the in�uence of g. The code was compiled
with Python 3.8.10 and run on an AMD Ryzen Threadrippe 3970X
32-Core processor with 3.7GHz and 256 GB RAM.
Algorithm 1 Create next data point depending on current direction
and previous value.
Require: 38A42C8>= 2 {0, 1} and previous point ?A4E
1: function N���V����(38A42C8>=, ?A4E)
2: while TRUE do
3: - ⇠ N (?A4E, 25)
4: if - > 0 then
5: if direction then
6: if - ?A4E then
7: return X
⇤ 8: with probability 15 return X
9: else
10: if - < ?A4E then
11: return X
12: with probability 15 return X
In the �rst set of experiments, we use generated curve data to
have control over the data characteristics. The goal is to gener-
ate trajectories that mimic real object movements, such as a car
routes, and are therefore not too random. We hence use th follow-
ing approach: Trajectories are built iteratively and space and time
separately. In order to build the spatial part of the curve, take a
random starting point ? 1 2 [0, 1] 2 . Algorithm 1 now creates point
?8+1 based on ?8 , where x and y coordinates are created separately.
Therefore in each iteration there is a current direction (up and
down/ left and right) which is changed with each run with a proba-
1 . At start the direction for both coordinates are picked
bility of 10
randomly. After the �nal iteration the whole curve is normalized
to [0, 1] 2 . The temporal sequence is easier to create, since one can
1 We use fsolve provided by the Python ����� package in our implementation.
SIGSPATIAL ’22, November 1–4, 2022, Sea�le, WA, USA Theodor Gutschlag and Sabine Storandt

= ORT RTAB #AB RTBS RTDP #C = #C OImp ImpC ORT RTC

2 0.02 0.00 4.4 0.01 0.00 0 4 7 1.00044 1.06284 0.00110 0.15773
4 0.12 0.01 22.8 0.09 0.02 0 6 10 1.00040 1.03998 0.00234 0.23306
8 0.61 0.05 82.8 0.48 0.08 0 8 5 1.00030 1.06063 0.00124 0.24833
16 3.40 0.21 320.1 2.83 0.34 0 10 4 1.00032 1.00823 0.00094 0.23538
32 16.14 0.82 1184.5 13.94 1.37 0 Table 2: Experimental results for the frequency of the crit-
64 72.02 3.18 4462.4 63.59 5.25 0 ical values of ���� �. Here = is the length of the two input
128 331.87 12.51 17219.5 284.43 20.21 0 curves, #C the overall number of cases in which a critical
Table 1: Results of the scalability experiment. = is the length value ���� � is the optimum. OImp is the average factor, by
of the input curves. ORT is the average running time in sec- which critical values of ���� � improve the optimum and
onds; RTAB is the running time needed to compute critical IC is the average factor by which critical values of ���� �
values of ���� � and ���� �, and #AB is the number of improve the optimum in case the optimum is of ���� �. Fi-
unique critical values of ���� � and ���� �. RTBS is the nally, ORT is the percentage of the total runtime needed to
time for the binary search, RTDP the average time spent compute the values of ���� � and RTC the percentage of the
on the decision problem. Finally #C is the number of cases total runtime needed in case a critical values of ���� � is the
where a critical value ���� � is the optimum. optimum.

g2 #C OImp ImpC ORT RTC

pick numbers randomly from [0, 1] without repetitions and sort G 5 1.00027 1.05435 0.00056 0.11206
them in order for it to be strictly monotonously increasing. G2 5 1.00021 1.04322 0.00060 0.12081
Visualized examples of spatio-temporal curves created with this G4 7 1.00034 1.04849 0.00080 0.11406
procedure are shown in Figure 1. G8 11 1.00083 1.07609 0.00153 0.13920
To assess the scalability, the Generalized Fréchet distance was Table 3: The e�ect of g on the occurrence and weight of the
computed for two generated trajectories of size 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 critical values of ���� �.
and 128. To reduce the e�ect of outliers for each input size, the
average of tenqiterations is used. As weight function g : R3 ! R,
g (G 1, G 2, G 3 ) = G 12 + G 22 + G 22 was selected. However, the choice of
the weight functions had no in�uence on the running times. The varied, see Table 3. The input is in each instance a generated curve
results are shown in Table 1. In none of the test runs a critical value of length four. Each test was executed 1000 times.
of ���� � is the optimal Generalized Fréchet distance for two given The experiment shows that the frequency in which critical values
curves. If, after computing the critical interval [Y 1, Y 2 ], the decision ���� � represent the optimum is less than 1% of the examined cases.
problem for Y 2 r is false, then Y 2 is returned. In this case, the Interestingly, the occurrence of cases where ���� � is the optimum
algorithm has an asymptotic running time of O (=< log(=<)) and increases with increasing polynomial degree of g2 as well as their
the measured running times seem to align with that. improvements compared to Y 2 . Since in our test data the third
To further study the in�uence of critical values of ���� �, we dimension is non-decreasing and in [0, 1], increasing polynomial
conducted two additional experiments. In the �rst experiment, we degree leads to an overall weaker weighting of the third dimension
varied the trajectory size = from 2 to 10 and conducted 1000 test runs and therefore increases the probability of values of ���� �. This is
for each =. The results are presented in Table 2. The experiment due to the fact that values of ���� � can only appear if there are
shows that critical values of ���� � represent the optimum in convolutions in the curve. However, since the third dimension is
less than 1% of the examined cases. Interestingly, as the input size non-decreasing, a strong weighting of it reduces the frequency of
increases, the improvements obtained by ���� � values decrease the values of ���� �.
compared to considering only values of ���� � and ���� �. This is Based on these observations, a heuristic that estimates the Weigh-
due to the fact that the critical interval becomes smaller, and thus the ted Fréchet distance by ignoring critical values of ���� � leads to a
possible improvements by a critical value of ���� � become smaller, reduction of the asymptotic running time to O (=< log(=<)) and
as well. The critical interval becomes smaller for larger curves, simpli�es the implementation. This is especially sensible as our
because the number of ���� � values grows quadratically and hence experiments show that with an increase of the curve lengths the
the distance between the values is expected to become smaller. Due estimation quality improves.
to the same reason, as the size of the input curves increases, the
percentage of ���� � values being the optimum decreases. 4.3 Similarity in Geese Flights
For the second experiment, we investigate the in�uence of di�er-
Finally, we use a real-world data set to investigate the in�uence
ent weightings of the temporal dimension on the values of ���� �.
of di�erent incarnations of the Generalized Fréchet distance. The
Therefore let g (G 1, G 2, G 3 ) q= g1 (G 1, G 2 ) +g2 (G 3 ) be the function with
experiments are carried out on geese migration data which was
g1 : R2 ! R g1 (G 1, G 2 ) = G 12 + G 22 �xed and where g2 : R ! R is already investigated in the context of trajectory similarity [10].
On the Generalized Fréchet Distance and its Applications SIGSPATIAL ’22, November 1–4, 2022, Sea�le, WA, USA

Figure 4: Visualisation of the migration routes of 18 geese. To study which geese migrated together not only the spatial course
but also the temporal similarity of the trajectories needs to be considered.

Figure 5: Trajectory similarity of 18 geese migration routes, shown here as heat maps. The redder the square, the more similar
the routes in the respective row and colum. On the left (i), the classic Fréchet distance is used, where time does not e�ect
the evaluation. The middle (ii) and right (iii) graphics use the Generalized Fréchet distance. In addition to the geographical
information, the temporal course is included. In the middle and in the right graphic, the geographical data is weighted by the
Euclidean Distance and the temporal plane is weighted by G in the middle and G 4 in the right graphic.

q
The goal is to discover which individuals have similar migration (i) g1 : R2 ! R, g1 (G 1, G 2 ) = G 12 + G 22
behaviour and which, if any, have �own together. q
The data set consists of GPS data of di�erent individuals tracked (ii) g2 : R3 ! R, g2 (G 1, G 2, G 3 ) = G 12 + G 22 + G 3
q
over the same period of time. In preparation of the experiment, (iii) g3 : R3 ! R, g3 (G 1, G 2, G 3 ) = G 12 + G 22 + G 34 .
we did some elementary preprocessing. We removed all trajecto-
ries with less than �ve data points, as those only captured local
Note that (i) is the classical Fréchet distance, while (ii) and (iii) are
movement but not migration. For the remaining 18 trajectories, we
chosen to show the impact of a large di�erences in the gradient of
normalised the coordinates to [0, 1] 2 and the corresponding time
the selected weight functions.
stamps to [0, 1]. Since the data points of the individual trajecto-
The results are shown in Figure 5, represented as colormaps.
ries are close to each other, we subsampled the curves such that
The di�erent patterns emerging in the colormaps indicate that the
the trajectories have an approximate length of 20 on average. The
similarity di�ers greatly between the four scenarios. One obvious
trajectories are shown in Figure 4.
observation is, that in (ii) and (iii), the similarity is more di�er-
In our experiment, we calculate the similarity of each pair of
entiated than (i). In (i) there appears to be a subset of ten geese
trajectories for three di�erent weight functions:
with similar spatial course. However (ii) suggests that there are
di�erences in the temporal course of the routes. In particular, (ii)
SIGSPATIAL ’22, November 1–4, 2022, Sea�le, WA, USA
shows that geese 1 and 11 are the only two that migrated together
with respect to both the spatial and the temporal dimensions. In
(iii), similar to (i), one can see that there is a subset that has strong
similarities in both temporal and spatial course. What is striking,
however, is that in (i) there are two trajectories with weak similari-
ties to the others (1, 8) and in (iii) there are four (3,5,7,8). Thus goose
1 seems to have a di�erent spatial course but a similar temporal one.
Geese 3, 5, 7 and 8 on the other hand still have a similar spatial but
very di�erent temporal course. It can be clearly seen that curves 3,
5, 7, 8 and 12 show strong di�erences in the temporal course and
that these birds therefore did not �y together. Trajectory 10 is also
interesting, as it shows a high degree of similarity to all the others
and is therefore close to the average in terms of time course.
Our results imply that the use of di�erent functions leads to
drastically di�erent relative similarities. Thus, choosing a suitable
function helps to make the distance measure more interpretable
and to gain a deeper understanding of the underlying data.
5 CONCLUSION
We introduced the Generalized Fréchet distance, discussed theo-
retical properties and possible applications, and provided a proof-
of-concept implementation. The �exibility of the measure can be
utilized to come up with the most suitable incarnation for a given
application scenario. The practical running times can certainly
be further improved by incorporating more engineering concepts
or testing other numerical equation solvers. From a theoretical
perspective, it would be interesting to investigate whether approxi-
mation algorithms for the classical Fréchet distance transfer to the
generalized version.
6 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German
Research Foundation) - Project-ID 251654672 - TRR 161.
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