Exact Computation of the Hausdorff Distance between Triangular Meshes

Abstract

We present an algorithm that computes the exact Hausdorff distance between two arbitrary triangular meshes. Our method computes squared distances for each point on each triangle of one mesh to all relevant triangles of the other mesh yielding a continuous, piecewise convex quadratic polynomial over domains bounded by conics. The maximum of this polynomial is the one-sided Hausdorff distance from one to the other mesh. We ensure the efficiency of our approach by employing a voxel grid for searching relevant triangles and an attributed half-edge data structure for representing the squared distance function.