Improvement of TD-TR Algorithm for Simplifying GPS Trajectory Data

Over the past decades, massive amounts of GPS trajectories have been obtained with the development of low-cost GPS enabled devices, capturing users' spatial and temporal information. The massive increase in trajectory data generates high storage and data processing burdens. Several of trajectory simplification algorithms have been proposed to overcome these difficulties. A key requirement in trajectories simplification is to minimize information loss while preserving the quality of the information. To further reduce the compression time, an improved algorithm for top-down time-ratio (TD-TR) called top-down time-ratio Reduce (TD-TR Reduce) is proposed. The algorithms were evaluated using several parameters, such as compression times and errors arising from trajectory data simplifications in the Geolife trajectory data set. The results of the simulation show that TD-TR Reduce can achieve an attractive trade-off between the compression rate and the simplification error with up to 33% lower compression time.