摘要：In this paper, we study the following pattern search problem: Given a pair of point sets A and B in fixed dimensional space R^d, with B = n, A = m and n >= m, the pattern search problem is to find the translations T's of A such that each of the identified translations induces a matching between T(A) and a subset B' of B with cost no more than some given threshold, where the cost is defined as the minimum bipartite matching cost of T(A) and B'. We present a novel algorithm to produce a small set of candidate translations for the pattern search problem. For any B' subseteq B with B' = A , there exists at least one translation T in the candidate set such that the minimum bipartite matching cost between T(A) and B' is no larger than (1+epsilon) times the minimum bipartite matching cost between A and B' under any translation (i.e., the optimal translational matching cost). We also show that there exists an alternative solution to this problem, which constructs a candidate set of size O(n log^2 n) in O(n log^2 n) time with high probability of success. As a by-product of our construction, we obtain a weak epsilon-net for hypercube ranges, which significantly improves the construction time and the size of the candidate set. Our technique can be applied to a number of applications, including the translational pattern matching problem.
