Updating Road Networks by Local Renewal from GPS Trajectories

The long production cycle and huge cost of collecting road network data often leave the data lagging behind the latest real conditions. However, this situation is rapidly changing as the positioning techniques ubiquitously used in mobile devices are gradually being implemented in road network research and applications. Currently, the predominant approaches infer road networks from mobile location information (e.g., GPS trajectory data) directly using various extracting algorithms, which leads to expensive consumption of computational resources in the case of large-scale areas. For this reason, we propose an alternative that renews road networks with a novel spiral strategy, including a hidden Markov model (HMM) for detecting potential problems in existing road network data and a method to update the data, on the local scale, by generating new road segments from trajectory data. The proposed approach reduces computation costs on roads with completed or updated information by updating problem road segments in the minimum range of the road network. We evaluated the performance of our proposals using GPS traces collected from taxies and OpenStreetMap (OSM) road networks covering urban areas of Wuhan City.