A Benchmark for Distance Measurements

The need to analyze and visualize distances between objects arises in many use cases. Although the problem to calculate the distance between two polygonal objects may sound simple, real-world scenarios with large models will always be challenging, but optimization techniques - such as space partitioning - can reduce the complexity of the average case significantly. Our contribution to this problem is a publicly available benchmark to compare distance calculation algorithms. Furthermore, we evaluated the two most important techniques (hierarchical tree structures versus grid-based approaches).