There is a sign up schedule for this talk:

http://www.

cs.utexas.edu/department/webevent/utcs/events/cgi/eidshow.cgi?person=Carola

Wenk

Type of Talk:  UTCS Colloquium/Algorithms and Computation

Theory  (ACT) Seminar

Speaker/Affiliation:  Carola 
Wenk/University of Texas at San Antonio

Date/Time: Friday, February
27, 2009  11:00 a.m.

Location:  TAY 3.128

Host:&n

bsp; Vijaya Ramachandran

Talk Title:  "Fr''echet Distan

ce Variants for Curves and Surfaces"

Talk Abstract:

The c

omparison of geometric shapes is essential in various applications includin

g computer vision, computer aided design, robotics, medical imaging, an

d drug design. The Fr''echet distance is a similarity metric for continuou

s shapes such as curves or surfaces which is defined using reparametrizatio

ns of the shapes. Since it takes the continuity of the shapes into account

, it is generally a more appropriate distance measure than the often used H

ausdorff distance.

This talk will present algorithms for computi

ng several variants of the Fr''echet distance for polygonal curves, inclu

ding weak and strong variants of the Fr''echet distance (which make differ

ent assumptions on the reparameterizations), a geodesic variant, and a pa

rtial matching variant comparing a curve to a graph. For surfaces the Fr''

echet distance is generally NP-hard to compute. This talk will present a po

lynomial time algorithm to compute the Fr''echet distance between two simp

le polygons.

Speaker Bio:
Carola Wenk is an Associate Profe

ssor of Computer Science at UT San Antonio. She obtained her PhD from Free

University Berlin, Germany, where she was a member of the theoretical com

puter science group headed by Helmut Alt and Guenter Rote. She joined UTSA

after a two-year postdoc at the University of Arizona. Her interest is in a

lgorithms and computational geometry, specifically in shape matching, as

well as in applications including computational biology. She is the recipie

nt of an NSF CAREER award, and she won three research and teaching awards

at UTSA.