Polygon Matching and Indexing Under Affine Transformations

Abstract: Given a collection ${Z_1,Z_2,\ldots,Z_m}$ of $n$-sided polygons in the plane and a query polygon $W$ we give algorithms to find all $Z_\ell$ such that $W=f(Z_\ell)$ with $f$ an unknown similarity transformation in time independent of the size of the collection. If $f$ is a known affine transformation, we show how to find all $Z_\ell$ such that $W=f(Z_\ell)$ in $O(n+\log(m))$ time. For a pair $W,W^\prime$ of polygons we can find all the pairs $Z_\ell,Z_{\ell^\prime}$ such that $W=f(Z_\ell)$ and $W^\prime=f(Z_{\ell^\prime})$ for an unknown affine transformation $f$ in $O(m+n)$ time. For the case of triangles we also give bounds for the problem of matching triangles with variable vertices, which is equivalent to affine matching triangles in noisy conditions.