On Geometric Alignment in Low Doubling Dimension

In real-world, many problems can be formulated as the alignment between two geometric patterns. Previously, a great amount of research focus on the alignment of 2D or 3D patterns, especially in the field of computer vision. Recently, the alignment of geometric patterns in high dimension finds several novel applications, and has attracted more and more attentions. However, the research is still rather limited in terms of algorithms. To the best of our knowledge, most existing approaches for high dimensional alignment are just simple extensions of their counterparts for 2D and 3D cases, and often suffer from the issues such as high complexities. In this paper, we propose an effective framework to compress the high dimensional geometric patterns and approximately preserve the alignment quality. As a consequence, existing alignment approach can be applied to the compressed geometric patterns and thus the time complexity is significantly reduced. Our idea is inspired by the observation that high dimensional data often has a low intrinsic dimension. We adopt the widely used notion “doubling dimension” to measure the extents of our compression and the resulting approximation. Finally, we test our method on both random and real datasets; the experimental results reveal that running the alignment algorithm on compressed patterns can achieve similar qualities, comparing with the results on the original patterns, but the running times (including the times cost for compression) are substantially lower.