Segmentation of Trajectories on Nonmonotone Criteria

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 non-monotone 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: (i) computing the start-stop diagram, and (ii) finding the optimal segmentation for a given diagram. We show that (ii) 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 non-monotone 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 certain 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.

keywords: Computational Geometry, Geographical Information Analysis, Trajectories

Journal Article (peer-reviewed)

Anne Driemel, Boris Aronov, Frank Staals, Maarten Löffler, Marc van Kreveld
Segmentation of Trajectories on Nonmonotone Criteria
ACM Transactions on Algorithms
12, 2, 26-1–26-28, 2015
http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2660772

Conference Proceedings (peer-reviewed)

Anne Driemel, Boris Aronov, Frank Staals, Maarten Löffler, Marc van Kreveld
Segmentation of Trajectories for Non-Monotone Criteria
Proc. 24th Symposium on Discrete Algorithms
1897–1911, 2013
http://knowledgecenter.siam.org/0236-000092/1

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