How can the Euclidean distance be calculated with NumPy?

Question

I have two points in 3D:

(xa, ya, za)
(xb, yb, zb)

And I want to calculate the distance:

dist = sqrt((xa-xb)^2 + (ya-yb)^2 + (         


        

Answer 1

A nice one-liner:

dist = numpy.linalg.norm(a-b)

---

However, if speed is a concern I would recommend experimenting on your machine. I've found that using math library's sqrt with the ** operator for the square is much faster on my machine than the one-liner NumPy solution.

I ran my tests using this simple program:

#!/usr/bin/python
import math
import numpy
from random import uniform

def fastest_calc_dist(p1,p2):
    return math.sqrt((p2[0] - p1[0]) ** 2 +
                     (p2[1] - p1[1]) ** 2 +
                     (p2[2] - p1[2]) ** 2)

def math_calc_dist(p1,p2):
    return math.sqrt(math.pow((p2[0] - p1[0]), 2) +
                     math.pow((p2[1] - p1[1]), 2) +
                     math.pow((p2[2] - p1[2]), 2))

def numpy_calc_dist(p1,p2):
    return numpy.linalg.norm(numpy.array(p1)-numpy.array(p2))

TOTAL_LOCATIONS = 1000

p1 = dict()
p2 = dict()
for i in range(0, TOTAL_LOCATIONS):
    p1[i] = (uniform(0,1000),uniform(0,1000),uniform(0,1000))
    p2[i] = (uniform(0,1000),uniform(0,1000),uniform(0,1000))

total_dist = 0
for i in range(0, TOTAL_LOCATIONS):
    for j in range(0, TOTAL_LOCATIONS):
        dist = fastest_calc_dist(p1[i], p2[j]) #change this line for testing
        total_dist += dist

print total_dist

On my machine, math_calc_dist runs much faster than numpy_calc_dist: 1.5 seconds versus 23.5 seconds.

To get a measurable difference between fastest_calc_dist and math_calc_dist I had to up TOTAL_LOCATIONS to 6000. Then fastest_calc_dist takes ~50 seconds while math_calc_dist takes ~60 seconds.

You can also experiment with numpy.sqrt and numpy.square though both were slower than the math alternatives on my machine.

My tests were run with Python 2.6.6.