A Novel Algorithm for Computing Riemannian Geodesic Distance in Rectangular 2D Grids

We present a novel way to efficiently compute Riemannian geodesic distance over a two-dimensional domain. It is based on a previously presented method for computation of geodesic distances on surface meshes. Our method is adapted for rectangular grids, equipped with a variable anisotropic metric tensor. Processing and visualization of such tensor fields is common in certain applications, for instance structure tensor fields in image analysis and diffusion tensor fields in medical imaging.