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arXiv · 2403.04356

Fine-Grained Complexity of Earth Mover's Distance under Translation

Karl Bringmann·Frank Staals·Karol Węgrzycki·Geert van Wordragen
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Abstract

The Earth Mover's Distance is a popular similarity measure in several branches of computer science. It measures the minimum total edge length of a perfect matching between two point sets. The Earth Mover's Distance under Translation ($\mathrm{EMDuT}$) is a translation-invariant version thereof. It minimizes the Earth Mover's Distance over all translations of one point set. For $\mathrm{EMDuT}$ in $\mathbb{R}^1$, we present an $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(n^2)$-time algorithm. We also show that this algorithm is nearly optimal by presenting a matching conditional lower bound based on the Orthogonal Vectors Hypothesis. For $\mathrm{EMDuT}$ in $\mathbb{R}^d$, we present an $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(n^{2d+2})$-time algorithm for the $L_1$ and $L_\infty$ metric. We show that this dependence on $d$ is asymptotically tight, as an $n^{o(d)}$-time algorithm for $L_1$ or $L_\infty$ would contradict the Exponential Time Hypothesis (ETH). Prior to our work, only approximation algorithms were known for these problems.

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Karl Bringmann, Frank Staals, Karol Węgrzycki, Geert van Wordragen. 2025-11-17. Fine-Grained Complexity of Earth Mover's Distance under Translation. https://doi.org/10.20382/jocg.v16i2a10

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