{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/a-fast-algorithm-for-earth-mover-s-distance","title":"A fast algorithm for Earth Mover's Distance based on optimal transport and L1 type Regularization","arxiv_id":"1609.07092","date":"2016-09-22","proceeding":null,"authors":["Wuchen Li","Stanley Osher","Wilfrid Gangbo"],"abstract":"We propose a new algorithm to approximate the Earth Mover's distance (EMD). Our main idea is motivated by the theory of optimal transport, in which EMD can be reformulated as a familiar $L_1$ type minimization. We use a regularization which gives us a unique solution for this $L_1$ type problem. The new regularized minimization is very similar to problems which have been solved in the fields of compressed sensing and image processing, where several fast methods are available. In this paper, we adopt a primal-dual algorithm designed there, which uses very simple updates at each iteration and is shown to converge very rapidly. Several numerical examples are provided.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1609.07092v3","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1609.07092v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"a-fast-algorithm-for-earth-mover-s-distance","repo_url":"https://github.com/esarf/emd_approximation","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}