ST_FrechetDistance

Description

Implements algorithm for computing the Frechet distance restricted to discrete points for both geometries, based on Computing Discrete Frechet Distance . The Frechet distance is a measure of similarity between curves that takes into account the location and ordering of the points along the curves. Therefore it is often better than the Hausdorff distance.

When the optional densifyFrac is specified, this function performs a segment densification before computing the discrete Frechet distance. The densifyFrac parameter sets the fraction by which to densify each segment. Each segment will be split into a number of equal-length subsegments, whose fraction of the total length is closest to the given fraction.

	The current implementation supports only vertices as the discrete locations. This could be extended to allow an arbitrary density of points to be used.

	The smaller densifyFrac we specify, the more acurate Frechet distance we get. But, the computation time and the memory usage increase with the square of the number of subsegments.

Availability: 2.4.0 - requires GEOS >= 3.7.0

Examples

postgres=# SELECT st_frechetdistance('LINESTRING (0 0, 100 0)'::geometry, 'LINESTRING (0 0, 50 50, 100 0)'::geometry);
 st_frechetdistance
--------------------
   70.7106781186548
(1 row)
			

SELECT st_frechetdistance('LINESTRING (0 0, 100 0)'::geometry, 'LINESTRING (0 0, 50 50, 100 0)'::geometry, 0.5);
 st_frechetdistance
--------------------
                 50
(1 row)
			

See Also

ST_HausdorffDistance