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Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Improving the precision of toad network inference from GPS trajectories

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

Current approaches to construct road network maps from GPS trajectories suffer from low precision, especially in dense urban areas and in regions with complex topologies such as overpasses and underpasses, parallel roads, and stacked roads. This work shows how to improve precision without sacrificing recall (coverage) by proposing a two-stage method. The first stage, RoadRunner, is a method that can generate high-precision maps even in challenging scenarios by incrementally following the flow of trajectories, using the connectivity between observations in each trajectory to decide whether overlapping trajectories are traversing the same road or distinct parallel roads, and to correctly infer road segment connectivity. By itself, RoadRunner is not designed to achieve high recall, but we show how to combine it with a wide range of prior schemes, some that use GPS trajectories and some that use aerial imagery, to achieve recall similar to prior schemes but at substantially higher precision. We evaluated RoadRunner in four U.S. cities using 60,000 GPS trajectories, and found that precision improves by 5.2 points (a 33.6% error rate reduction) and 24.3 points (a 60.7% error rate reduction) over two existing schemes, with a slight increase in recall.

Degree

thesis:*
Department dc:contributor.department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Grantor dc:publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Year dc:date.issued
2018

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • He, Songtao (Scientist in electrical engineering and computer science) Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
  • Hari Balakrishnan.

Subjects

dc:subject × 1

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.
Language dc:language.iso
eng

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Handle dc:identifier.uri
http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/120402
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/120402

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
MIT
Base URL
dspace.mit.edu/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

He, Songtao (Scientist in electrical engineering and computer science) Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Improving the precision of toad network inference from GPS trajectories. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/120402