Evaluating a distance function

Abstract

Computing the distance function to some surface or line is a problem that occurs very frequently. There are several ways of computing a relevant approximation of this function, using for example technique originating from the approximation of Hamilton Jacobi problems, or the fast sweeping method. Here we make a link with some elliptic problem and propose a very fast way to approximate the distance function.

Keywords

• Hamilton jacobi equation
• distance function
• Hopf-Cole transformation
• elliptic problem
• linear solver