An Efficient Approach for Trajectory Simplification Based on Essential Inflection Point Extraction

The prevalence of GPS positioning software has led to the generation of massive trajectory data, so it is necessary to take measures to compress the data. This paper proposes an efficient trajectory simplification algorithm based on Essential Inflection Point Extraction (EIPE). EIPE algorithm adopts synchronous Euclidean distance and direction angle deviation to preserve the temporal-spatial information while compressing the trajectories. However, considering the direction angle deviation will improve the compression rate for trajectories with high randomness in direction. To address this issue, we set a range threshold for the EIPE algorithm to extract essential inflection points from trajectories. The evaluation results on two real-life datasets indicate that our algorithm can improve compression efficiency and achieve satisfactory performance on both average direction angle deviation error and running time.