The need to analyze and visualize distances between objects arises in many use cases. Although the problem to calculate the distance between two polygonal objects may sound simple, real-world scenarios with large models will always be challenging, but optimization techniques - such as space partitioning - can reduce the complexity of the average case significantly. Our contribution to this problem is a publicly available benchmark to compare distance calculation algorithms. Furthermore, we evaluated the two most important techniques (hierarchical tree structures versus grid-based approaches).
