Identification of Curves and Straight Sections on Road Networks from Digital Vector Data

Abstract

Identification of curves and straight sections on roads is important from a traffic safety point of view. We present a method for the automatic identification of curves based on available geographic data -sequence of points which determines a line. The Douglas-Peucker algorithm is used to generalize the lines. At every point of the line, the coefficient of curvature is calculated. According to the coefficient of curvature it is possible to decide which line segments are curves and which are straight sections. For making the decision, other characteristics of lines were also studied, but the obtained results support that the coefficient of curvature is the most suitable of them. The method was applied on two sections from the district of Olomouc.

Navigation Application with Safety Features

“…According to [8], a method was proposed for the automatic identification of curves and their characteristics, particularly the horizontal size of the curves and their length on roads. According to the World Road Association (WRA), accidents tend to occur 1.5 to 4 times on curves than on straight roads.…”