A fast sweeping method for Eikonal equations

In this paper a fast sweeping method for computing the numerical solution of Eikonal equations on a rectangular grid is presented. The method is an iterative method which uses upwind difference for discretization and uses Gauss-Seidel iterations with alternating sweeping ordering to solve the discretized system. The crucial idea is that each sweeping ordering follows a family of characteristics of the corresponding Eikonal equation in a certain direction simultaneously. The method has an optimal complexity of O ( N ) O(N) for N N grid points and is extremely simple to implement in any number of dimensions. Monotonicity and stability properties of the fast sweeping algorithm are proven. Convergence and error estimates of the algorithm for computing the distance function is studied in detail. It is shown that 2 n 2^{n} Gauss-Seidel iterations is enough for the distance function in n n dimensions. An estimation of the number of iterations for general Eikonal equations is also studied. Numerical examples are used to verify the analysis.