Some properties of Gromov-Hausdorff distances

Abstract

The Gromov–Hausdorff distance between metric spaces appears to be a useful tool for modeling some object matching procedures. Since its conception it has been mainly used by pure mathematicians who are interested in the topology generated by this distance, and quantitative consequences of the definition are not very common. As a result, only few lower bounds for the distance are known, and the stability of many metric invariants is not understood. This paper aims at clarifying some of these points by proving several results dealing with explicit lower bounds for the Gromov–Hausdorff distance which involve different standard metric invariants. We also study a modified version of the Gromov–Hausdorff distance which is motivated by practical applications and both prove a structural theorem for it and study its topological equivalence to the usual notion. This structural theorem provides a decomposition of the modified Gromov–Hausdorff distance as the supremum over a family of pseudo-metrics, each of which involves the comparison of certain discrete analogues of curvature. This modified version relates the standard Gromov–Hausdorff distance to the work of Boutin and Kemper, and Olver.