A Fast [Formula Omitted] Multiresolution Polygonal Approximation Algorithm for GPS Trajectory Simplification

• Published in: IEEE transactions on image processing Vol. 21; no. 5; p. 2770
• Main Authors: Chen, Minjie, Xu, Mantao, Franti, Pasi
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE) 01.05.2012
• Subjects: Algorithms; Studies
• ISSN: 1057-7149; 1941-0042
• DOI: 10.1109/TIP.2012.2186146

Recent advances in geopositioning mobile phones have made it possible for users to collect a large number of GPS trajectories by recording their location information. However, these mobile phones with built-in GPS devices usually record far more data than needed, which brings about both heavy data storage and a computationally expensive burden in the rendering process for a Web browser. To address this practical problem, we present a fast polygonal approximation algorithm in 2-D space for the GPS trajectory simplification under the so-called integral square synchronous distance error criterion in a linear time complexity. The underlying algorithm is designed and implemented using a bottom-up multiresolution method, where the input of polygonal approximation in the coarser resolution is the polygonal curve achieved in the finer resolution. For each resolution (map scale), priority-queue structure is exploited in graph construction to construct the initialized approximated curve. Once the polygonal curve is initialized, two fine-tune algorithms are employed in order to achieve the desirable quality level. Experimental results validated that the proposed algorithm is fast and achieves a better approximation result than the existing competitive methods.