1: 8 ● Y. Zheng
ACM Trans. Intelligent systems and technologies, Vol. 6, No. 3, Article 1, Pub. date: Sept. 2015.
Online Data Reduction: As many applications require to transmit trajectory data in a
timely fashion, a series of online trajectory compression techniques have been proposed to
determine whether a newly acquired spatial point should be retained in a trajectory. There
are two major categories of online compression methods. One is the window-based algori-
thms, such as the Sliding Window algorithm [46] and Open Window algorithm [67]. The
other is based on speed and direction of a moving object.
The idea of the Sliding Window algorithm is to fit the spatial points in a growing sliding
window with a valid line segment and continue to grow the sliding window until the appro-
ximation error exceeds some error bound. As illustrated in Fig 5 B),
will be first reser-
ved as the error for
exceeds the threshold. Then, the algorithm starts from
and reserve
. Other points are negligible. Different from the Sliding Window algorithm, the Open
Window algorithm [67] applies the heuristic of the Douglas-Peucker algorithm to choose
the point with the maximum error in the window (e.g.
in Figure 5 B) to approximate the
trajectory segment. This point is then used as a new anchor point to approximate its
successors.
Another category of algorithms consider speed and directions as key factors when doing
online trajectory compression. For instance, Potamias et al. [84] use a safe area, derived
from the last two locations and a given threshold, to determine whether a newly acquired
point contains important information. If the new data point is located within the safe area,
then this location point is considered as redundant and thus can be discarded; otherwise, it
is included in the approximated trajectory.
Compression with Semantic Meaning: A series of research [87][17] aims to keep the
semantic meanings of a trajectory, when compressing the trajectory. For instance, in a
location-based social network [140], some special points where a user stayed, took photos,
or changed direction greatly, would be more significant than other points in presenting
semantic meanings of a trajectory. Chen et al. [17] proposed a trajectory simplification
algorithm (TS), which considers both the shape skeleton and the aforementioned special
points. TS first divides a trajectory into walking and non-walking segments using a traject-
ory segmentation algorithm [147] (see Section 3.4). A point is weighted by its heading
change degree and the distance to its neighbors.
Another branch of research [45][90] considers trajectory compression with the cons-
traints of transportation networks. For example, we can reduce the redundant points on the
same road segment. We can even discard all the newly acquired points after an anchor
point, as long as the moving object is traveling on the shortest path from the anchor point
to its current location. This branch of work usually needs the support of map-matching
algorithms (refer to Section 3.5). In 2014, PRESS [90] was proposed to separate the spatial
representation of a trajectory from its temporal representation. PRESS consists of a hybrid
spatial compression algorithm and an error bounded temporal compression algorithm,
compressing the spatial and temporal information of trajectories respectively. The spatial
compression combines frequent sequential pattern mining techniques with Huffman Cod-
ing to reduce the size of a trajectory; i.e. a frequently traveled path can be represented by a
shorter code, therefore saving storages.
3.4 Trajectory Segmentation
In many scenarios, such as trajectories clustering and classification, we need to divide a
trajectory into segments for a further process. The segmentation does not only reduce the
computational complexity but also enable us to mine richer knowledge, such as sub-
trajectory patterns, beyond what we can learn from an entire trajectory. In general, there