Improvement of OPW-TR Algorithm for Compressing GPS Trajectory Data

Massive volumes of GPS trajectory data bring challenges to storage and processing. These issues can be addressed by compression algorithm which can reduce the size of the trajectory data. A key requirement for GPS trajectory compression algorithm is to reduce the size of the trajectory data while minimizing the loss of information. Synchronized Euclidean distance (SED) as an important error measure is adopted by most of the existing algorithms. In order to further reduce the SED error, an improved algorithm for open window time ratio (OPW-TR) called local optimum open window time ratio (LO-OPW-TR) is proposed. In order to make SED error smaller, the anchor points are selected by calculating point’s accumulated synchronized Euclidean distance (ASED). A variety of error metrics are used for the algorithm evaluation. The experimental results show that the errors of our algorithm are smaller than the existing algorithms in terms of SED and speed errors under the same compression ratio.