How do I calculate the distance from a point to a line on a sphere in MATLAB?

I have the latitude and longitude of two points on the surface of a sphere, A(lat1, lon1) and B (lat2, lon2). I also have a matrix V containing 10,000+ other points on the sphere (lat and long). I am interested in finding the point that is closest to the great circle line AB. Is there anything in the Mapping Toolbox or general MATLAB that computes the great circle distance between each of the points in V and the line AB?

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

Currently there is no tool in MATLAB that will directly give the desired output. However, we can compute the distances by creating code that implements a few mathematical steps, included between the dashed lines below.

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Suppose we have a line AB on a unit sphere. We want to find the shortest distance from another point, C, to the line AB. In other words, consider the plane defined by A, B, and O (the center of the sphere, also the origin). Let's call this plane P. We are interested in the angle theta between the vector OC and plane P. If the sphere has radius r, the surface distance is simply r*theta.

1. Convert A, B, and C to Cartesian coordinates

2. Computer n, the unit normal vector to the plane defined by A, B, and O. n is the normalized cross product of OA and OB

3. Consider the Euclidean distance from C to plane P. This distance is equal to sin(theta), which is mathematically equal to cos(90-theta) if we define distance such that theta<90

4. cos(90-theta) can also be represented as the dot product of n and OC

5. set steps 3 and 4 equal to each other and solve for theta

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% MATLAB code segment to implement the above

% V is an m x 2 matrix where each row is [lat long] of one point whose distance to AB we wish to calculate

% Convert everything from degrees to radians, then to Cartesian coordinates 

a = deg2rad([lat1 lon1]);

[ax, ay, az] = sph2cart(a(2), a(1), 1);

A = [ax ay az];

 

b = deg2rad([lat2 lon2]);

[bx, by, bz] = sph2cart(b(2), b(1), 1);

B = [bx by bz];

 

c = deg2rad(V);

[cx, cy, cz] = sph2cart(c(:,2), c(:,1), 1);

C = [cx cy cz];

 

% Compute n, the unit normal vector to the plane defined by A, B, and O

n = cross(A, B);

n = n/norm(n);

 

% Find theta for all points in V in radians and degrees

sinTheta = abs(C*n');    % dot product

theta = asin(sinTheta);  % theta is an m x 1 vector containing the angular distance (in radians) from each of the m points in V to line AB

                         % To get surface distance, multiply by radius of sphere

% Get shortest distance and the index of the corresponding point

(dist, ind) = min(theta);