Associating the regions of a geographic subdivision with the cells of a grid is a basic operation that is used in various types of maps, like spatially ordered treemaps and Origin-Destination maps (OD maps). In these cases the regular shapes of the grid cells allow easy representation of extra information about the regions. The main challenge is to find an association that allows a user to find a region in the grid quickly. We call the representation of a set of regions as a grid a grid map.We introduce a new approach to solve the association problem for grid maps by formulating it as a point set matching problem: Given two sets A (the centroids of the regions) and B (the grid centres) of n points in the plane, compute an optimal one-to-one matching between A and B. We identify three optimisation criteria that are important for grid map layout: maximise the number of adjacencies in the grid that are also adjacencies of the regions, minimise the sum of the distances between matched points, and maximise the number of pairs of points in A for which the matching preserves the directional relation (SW, NW, etc.). We consider matchings that minimise the L 1 -distance (Manhattan-distance), the ranked L 1 -distance, and the L 2 2 -distance, since one can expect that minimising distances implicitly helps to fulfill the other criteria.We present algorithms to compute such matchings and perform an experimental comparison that also includes a previous method to compute a grid map. The experiments show that our more global, matching-based algorithm outperforms previous, more local approaches with respect to all three optimisation criteria.

Abstract.The collective motion of a set of moving entities like people, birds, or other animals, is characterized by groups arising, merging, splitting, and ending. Given the trajectories of these entities, we define and model a structure that captures all of such changes using the Reeb graph, a concept from topology. The trajectory grouping structure has three natural parameters that allow more global views of the data in group size, group duration, and entity inter-distance. We prove complexity bounds on the maximum number of maximal groups that can be present, and give algorithms to compute the grouping structure efficiently. We also study how the trajectory grouping structure can be made robust, that is, how brief interruptions of groups can be disregarded in the global structure, adding a notion of persistence to the structure. Furthermore, we showcase the results of experiments using data generated by the NetLogo flocking model and from the Starkey project. The Starkey data describe the movement of elk, deer, and cattle. Although there is no ground truth for the grouping structure in this data, the experiments show that the trajectory grouping structure is plausible and has the desired effects when changing the essential parameters. Our research provides the first complete study of trajectory group evolvement, including combinatorial, algorithmic, and experimental results.

We study one of the basic tasks in moving object analysis, namely the location of hotspots. A hotspot is a (small) region in which an entity spends a significant amount of time. Finding such regions is useful in many applications, for example in segmentation, clustering, and locating popular places. We may be interested in locating a minimum size hotspot in which the entity spends a fixed amount of time, or locating a fixed size hotspot maximizing the time that the entity spends inside it. Furthermore, we can consider the total time, or the longest contiguous time the entity spends in the hotspot. We solve all four versions of the problem. For a square hotspot, we can solve the contiguoustime versions in O(n log n) time, where n is the number of trajectory vertices. The algorithms for the total-time versions are roughly quadratic. Finding a hotspot containing relatively the most time, compared to its size, takes O(n 3 ) time. Even though we focus on a single moving entity, our algorithms immediately extend to multiple entities. Finally, we consider hotspots of different shape.

In the trajectory segmentation problem, we are given a polygonal trajectory with n vertices that we have to subdivide into a minimum number of disjoint segments (subtrajectories) that all satisfy a given criterion. The problem is known to be solvable efficiently for monotone criteria: criteria with the property that if they hold on a certain segment, they also hold on every subsegment of that segment. To the best of our knowledge, no theoretical results are known for nonmonotone criteria.We present a broader study of the segmentation problem, and suggest a general framework for solving it, based on the start-stop diagram: a 2-dimensional diagram that represents all valid and invalid segments of a given trajectory. This yields two subproblems: (1) computing the start-stop diagram, and (2) finding the optimal segmentation for a given diagram. We show that (2) is NP-hard in general. However, we identify properties of the start-stop diagram that make the problem tractable and give a polynomial-time algorithm for this case.We study two concrete nonmonotone criteria that arise in practical applications in more detail. Both are based on a given univariate attribute function f over the domain of the trajectory. We say a segment satisfies an outlier-tolerant criterion if the value of f lies within a certain range for at least a given percentage of the length of the segment. We say a segment satisfies a standard deviation criterion if the standard deviation of f over the length of the segment lies below a given threshold. We show that both criteria satisfy the properties that make the segmentation problem tractable. In particular, we compute an optimal segmentation of a trajectory based on the outlier-tolerant criterion in O(n 2 log n + kn 2 ) time and on the standard deviation criterion in O(kn 2 ) time, where n is the number of vertices of the input trajectory and k is the number of segments in an optimal solution.

We propose a new approach for constructing the underlying map from trajectory data. Our algorithm is based on the idea that road segments can be identified as stable subtrajectory clusters in the data. For this, we consider how subtrajectory clusters evolve for varying distance values, and choose stable values for these. In doing so we avoid a global proximity parameter. Within trajectory clusters, we choose representatives, which are combined to form the map. We experimentally evaluate our algorithm on vehicle and hiking tracking data. These experiments demonstrate that our approach can naturally separate roads that run close to each other and can deal with outliers in the data, two issues that are notoriously difficult in road network reconstruction.