:param flow: The resultant :math:`\texttt{size1} \times \texttt{size2}` flow matrix: :math:`\texttt{flow}_{i,j}` is a flow from :math:`i` th point of ``signature1`` to :math:`j` th point of ``signature2`` .
The function computes the earth mover distance and/or a lower boundary of the distance between the two weighted point configurations. One of the applications described in :ref:`RubnerSept98` is multi-dimensional histogram comparison for image retrieval. EMD is a transportation problem that is solved using some modification of a simplex algorithm, thus the complexity is exponential in the worst case, though, on average it is much faster. In the case of a real metric the lower boundary can be calculated even faster (using linear-time algorithm) and it can be used to determine roughly whether the two signatures are far enough so that they cannot relate to the same object.
