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definition. signed distance function [wiki-sdf] [ag-000I]

Let \(\Omega \) be a subset of a metric space \(X\) with metric \(d\), and \(\partial \Omega \) be its boundary. The distance between a point \(\boldsymbol {p}\) of \(X\) and the subset \(\partial \Omega \) of \(X\) is defined as usual as \[ d(\boldsymbol {p}, \partial \Omega )=\inf _{\boldsymbol {q} \in \partial \Omega } d(\boldsymbol {p}, \boldsymbol {q}) \] where \(\inf \) denotes the infimum, i.e. the greatest lower bound.

The signed distance function or signed distance field (SDF) from a point \(\boldsymbol {p}\) of \(X\) to \(\Omega \) is defined by \[ f(\boldsymbol {p})= \begin {cases} -d(\boldsymbol {p}, \partial \Omega ) & \text { if } \boldsymbol {p} \in \Omega \\ d(\boldsymbol {p}, \partial \Omega ) & \text { if } \boldsymbol {p} \notin \Omega \end {cases} \]