text: The bottleneck distance is a natural measure of the distance between two finite point sets of equal cardinality. In this work, we consider the problem of indexing a set of @math planar point sets (of varying sizes) to create a database @math that supports nearest bottleneck distance queries: given a query point set @math of size @math , the point sets @math that are closest in terms of bottleneck distance are returned. Without loss of generality, we assume that all point sets belong to the unit box @math in the plane. The main contribution of this work is a trie -based data structure that is space efficient and supports @math -approximate nearest bottleneck queries in @math time, where @math is the minimum bottleneck distance from @math to any point set in @math . A direct consequence, of independent interest, is a simple @math time algorithm to @math -approximate @math , for any two point sets @math and @math . Finally, the querying algorithm proposed is easily adapted to support nearest subset and superset queries.
  @cite_9: Let A and B be two sets of n objects in d , and let Match be a (one-to-one) matching between A and B . Let min(Match ), max(Match ), and Σ(Match) denote the length of the shortest edge, the length of the longest edge, and the sum of the lengths of the edges of Match , respectively. Bottleneck matching— a matching that minimizes max(Match )— is suggested as a convenient way for measuring the resemblance between A and B . Several algorithms for computing, as well as approximating, this resemblance are proposed. The running time of all the algorithms involving planar objects is roughly O(n 1.5 ) . For instance, if the objects are points in the plane, the running time of the exact algorithm is O(n 1.5 log n ) . A semidynamic data structure for answering containment problems for a set of congruent disks in the plane is developed. This data structure may be of independent interest.
  @cite_1: The present paper shows how to construct a maximum matching in a bipartite graph with n vertices and m edges in a number of computation steps proportional to @math .
summary: Bottleneck distance is closely related to the bipartite matching problem, which can be solved by the classic maximum flow technique of Hopcroft and Karp @cite_1 . The current best exact algorithm for planar bipartite matching is due to Efrat @cite_9 and runs in @math time for point sets of size @math .