Distance from points to an ellipse

This function can calculate the geometric distance from one or more points to an ellipse in 2D.

Description

This function uses a dumb search to find the minimum distance between a point (or many points) and an ellipse. It has controllable accuracy which may be reduced for faster computation.

*Update 12 Jan 2010: Rody Oldenhuis has submitted a version of this file (possibly only for versions >=Matlab 2009a) that works for general 3D ellipses and should be more efficient than this one. Please see acknowledgements below.

*Update 08 Jan 2010: fixed a bug in original file

Acknowledgements

Distance Between Points And Ellipse inspired this file.

This file inspired Distance Between Points And Ellipse.

• MATLAB release: MATLAB 7.7 (R2008b)

[Matthew Arthington]

It finds the distance from points to an ellipse contour.

[niki n]

hi does this code find the min dis from point to the ellipse center or contour ?Any help will be greatly appreciated.thanks

[Rody Oldenhuis]

While reading your post I was reminded of a long and tedious hunt I recently did for an efficient algorithm to find the distance between two confocal ellipses. One of the things I came across was exactly this problem (point - ellipse), and I remembered I still had the code for it somewhere.

So, I brushed it a bit, and I've just posted it (I made an acknowledgement to you as well). I hope my code can help you out.