CS 789 THEORY SEMINAR [home]

Speaker:  Yuval Rabani
Affiliation: Technion and Cornell University
Date: Monday, February 2nd
Title: Low Distortion Maps between Point Sets

Abstract:

We initiate the study of the minimum distortion problem: given as input two n-point metric spaces, find a bijection between them with minimum distortion. This is an abstraction of certain geometric problems in shape and image matching, and is also a natural variation and extension of the fundamental problems of graph isomorphism and bandwidth. Our focus is on algorithms that find an optimal (or near-optimal) bijection when the distortion is fairly small. We present a polynomial time algorithm that finds an optimal bijection between two line metrics, provided the distortion is at most 2+sqrt{5}. We also give a parameterized polynomial time algorithm that finds an optimal bijection between an arbitrary unweighted graph metric and a bounded-degree tree metric.

This is joint work with Claire Kenyon and Alistair Sinclair.