  The Fr\'echet distance is a popular distance measure for curves which
naturally lends itself to fundamental computational tasks, such as clustering,
nearest-neighbor searching, and spherical range searching in the corresponding
metric space. However, its inherent complexity poses considerable computational
challenges in practice. To address this problem we study distortion of the
probabilistic embedding that results from projecting the curves to a randomly
chosen line. Such an embedding could be used in combination with, e.g.
locality-sensitive hashing. We show that in the worst case and under reasonable
assumptions, the discrete Fr\'echet distance between two polygonal curves of
complexity $t$ in $\mathbb{R}^d$, where $d\in\lbrace 2,3,4,5\rbrace$, degrades
by a factor linear in $t$ with constant probability. We show upper and lower
bounds on the distortion. We also evaluate our findings empirically on a
benchmark data set. The preliminary experimental results stand in stark
contrast with our lower bounds. They indicate that highly distorted projections
happen very rarely in practice, and only for strongly conditioned input curves.
  Keywords: Fr\'echet distance, metric embeddings, random projections
