  This paper introduces a new mathematical formulation and numerical approach
for the computation of distances and geodesics between immersed planar curves.
Our approach combines the general simplifying transform for first-order elastic
metrics that was recently introduced by Kurtek and Needham, together with a
relaxation of the matching constraint using parametrization-invariant fidelity
metrics. The main advantages of this formulation are that it leads to a simple
optimization problem for discretized curves, and that it provides a flexible
approach to deal with noisy, inconsistent or corrupted data. These benefits are
illustrated via a few preliminary numerical results.
