I am a software developer not a mathematician, so going easy on me would be greatly appreciated.
I need a way of comparing various methods of determining location against a known route. This will take the form of tracks, i.e., arrays of lat-longs. I need to write some code that will compare the two arrays and give me a measure of how similar they are to one another.
I have computed the sum and the average cross track error by cycling through each point and measuring the distance to the closest point of the known route, but I am not sure whether it tells me anything useful.
I have seen some articles on Hausdorff distance (and dimension) and in particular Wikipedia describes "A measure for the dissimilarity of two shapes is given by Hausdorff distance up to isometry", which looks promising but I confess I don't understand what this means let alone how to implement the algorithm in code.
In short I would like to be able to quantify that method 1 is better than method 2 at determining location and any help would be useful.