Representation methods of distance between spatial objects in GIS and their analysis

Spatial distance is an important metric indicator which is commonly used to constrain and represent the relative location relations between spatial objects.Therefore,the representation and computation of spatial distance between spatial objects may have a clear effect on the results of spatial query,spatial reasoning and spatial analysis.Classic Euclidean distance is only suitable for points.Meanwhile,simply extended distance metrics as minimum distance,maximum distance and centroid distance do not take into account the geometric characteristics of spatial objects,such as shape,positional distribution and so on.For this reason,the scholars develop some representative distances for various practical applications,e.g.Hausdorff distance,boundary Hausdorff distance,dual-Hausdorff distance,extended Hausdorff distance,Frechet distance,turning function distance and area of symmetric difference metric.This paper plays emphasis on the summary of the representation methods of all these distances,pointing out their limitations and adaptabilities,so as to develop more robust distance metrics for application problems in geo-information science.