Distance bounds for high dimensional consistent digital rays and 2-D partially-consistent digital rays

TL;DR

This paper investigates the theoretical bounds on the accuracy of digitalizing Euclidean segments in high-dimensional integer grids, establishing new lower bounds and exploring the tradeoff between consistency and approximation error.

Contribution

It extends the understanding of error bounds for consistent digital segment constructions from 2D to higher dimensions, introducing a new lower bound and linking it to weak constructions.

Findings

Any consistent construction in d dimensions has an error of at least (-1) log^{1/(d-1)} N.

The error bounds in high dimensions are connected to weak 2D constructions with some axiom violations.

The paper introduces a colored discrepancy measure of independent interest.

Abstract

We consider the problem of digitalizing Euclidean segments. Specifically, we look for a constructive method to connect any two points in $\mathbb{Z}^d$. The construction must be {\em consistent} (that is, satisfy the natural extension of the Euclidean axioms) while resembling them as much as possible. Previous work has shown asymptotically tight results in two dimensions with $\Theta(\log N)$ error, where resemblance between segments is measured with the Hausdorff distance, and $N$ is the $L_1$ distance between the two points. This construction was considered tight because of a $\Omega(\log N)$ lower bound that applies to any consistent construction in $\mathbb{Z}^2$. In this paper we observe that the lower bound does not directly extend to higher dimensions. We give an alternative argument showing that any consistent construction in $d$ dimensions must have $\Omega(\log^{1/(d-1)} N)$ error. We tie the error of a consistent construction in high dimensions to the error of similar {\em weak} constructions in two dimensions (constructions for which some points need not satisfy all the axioms). This not only opens the possibility for having constructions with $o(\log N)$ error in high dimensions, but also opens up an interesting line of research in the tradeoff between the number of axiom violations and the error of the construction. In order to show our lower bound, we also consider a colored variation of the concept of discrepancy of a set of points that we find of independent interest.