An Interactive Map-based System for Visually Exploring and Cleaning GPS Traces

Abstract

It is a fact that there are tons of GPS traces generated every minute by the millions of in-road vehicles over the world. Naturally, those traces contain imprecise readings, and most of the time they include noise and outliers. Therefore, there is a real need for a tool to allow users, companies, and researchers to get a deep insight into those raw traces and discover potential knowledge out of it. This knowledge would uncover the quality level of the GPS traces and, indeed, the quality level of the underlying map. It would also help discover interesting facts about the surrounding environment such as the type and height of buildings, the landscape cover, the weather conditions, and the nature of businesses and activities. This demo presents a system that allows users to interactively explore their collected GPS traces. Users can visually inspect the precision of their raw GPS traces, and snap these traces to the underlying road network map. Furthermore, users have the ability to clean their traces by applying various types of spatio-temporal filters. Users can perform noise analysis and produce statistics over regions of interest on the map. Last but not least, the system gives suggestions or guesses on the surrounding environment by comparing the perceived noise patterns to a database of pre-stored noise patterns. For the demo purpose, the system is initially populated with a rich data set of trajectories generated from the Microsoft shuttle service around the Greater Area of Seattle.