Relaxing the Triangle Inequality in Pattern Matching

  • Authors:
  • Ronald Fagin;Larry Stockmeyer

  • Affiliations:
  • IBM Almaden Research Center, 650 Harry Road, San Jose, CA 95120-6099. E-mail: fagin@almaden.ibm.com;IBM Almaden Research Center, 650 Harry Road, San Jose, CA 95120-6099. E-mail: stock@almaden.ibm.com

  • Venue:
  • International Journal of Computer Vision
  • Year:
  • 1998

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Abstract

Any notion of “closeness” in pattern matching should have the property that if A is close to B, and B is close to C, then A is close to C.Traditionally, this property is attained because ofthe triangle inequality(d(A, C) ≤ d(A, B) + d(B, C), where d represents a notion ofdistance). However, the full power of the triangle inequalityis not needed for this property to hold.Instead, a “relaxed triangle inequality” suffices, of the formd(A, C) ≤ c(d(A, B) + d(B, C)), where c is a constant that is not too large. In this paper, we show that one of the measures used fordistances between shapes in (an experimental version of) IBM‘s QBIC1(“Query by Image Content”) system (Niblack et al., 1993)satisfies a relaxed triangle inequality,although it does not satisfy the triangle inequality.