Fast Approximate $\ell_p$ Chamfer Distance via Lopsided Embeddings and Structured JL

For two $d$-dimensional point sets $A,B$ of size $n$, the Chamfer distance from $A$ to $B$ is defined as $\text{CH}(A,B)=\sum_{a \in A} \min_{b \in B} \mathsf{dist}(a, b)$, where $\mathsf{dist}$ is some underlying distance measure. We present efficient algorithms for approximating the Chamfer distance under the $\ell_p$ norm for $1 < p \le 2$. For the general case $1 < p < 2$, we utilize lopsided $\ell_p$ to $\ell_1$ embeddings with weak guarantees. We show that they are sufficient for preserving the Chamfer distance. In the high-dimensional regime, we use Fast Matrix Multiplication techniques to speed up the lopsided embeddings. These lead to $\mathcal{O}(nd\cdot \mathrm{poly}(\log \log n, \log(1/\varepsilon))/\varepsilon^2)$ total time. For the specific Euclidean case ($p=2$), we leverage the Fast Johnson-Lindenstrauss Transform based on Toeplitz matrices and re-analyze the previous $\ell_1$-specific Chamfer algorithm in $\ell_2$. These achieve a runtime matching the recent state-of-the-art $\ell_1$ result of $\mathcal{O}(nd(\log \log n + \log(1/\varepsilon))/\varepsilon^2)$, improving upon the previous $\mathcal{O}(nd \log n/\varepsilon^2)$ bound for $\ell_2$. We also give additional results for the angular distance and upper and lower bounds in the streaming setting.