A trajectory feature extraction approach based on spatial coding technique

GPS data often have position deviations in precision and are apt to be affected by noise; hence, it is essential to extract features from trajectories before performing large-scale data mining. A GeoHash-based spatial coding technique called GeoHashTree was used to index spatiotemporal trajectory points in order to improve the efficiency of nearest-neighbor search. The GeoHashTree was applied in trajectory clustering and an improved density-based clustering algorithm was proposed to reduce the time complexity of nearest-neighbor search from $O(n^2)$ to $O(n\\log{n})$. After extracting trajectory points with changing angles, the proposed clustering approach was employed to achieve deep-level feature extraction on trajectory points with changing angles, which aims to accurately identify feature points. Extensive experiments are conducted on real GPS data and the results demonstrate that the proposed trajectory-clustering algorithm based on the GeoHashTree spatial index structure can improve time performance by an average of 90.89% as well as guarantee the accuracy of clustering compared with the traditional clustering method. The visualization results show that the trajectory feature extraction approach can effectively find trajectory points with changing angles and discover a varying types of feature points from large-scale data sets. In addition, the proposed approach does not depend on road network data and can dynamically update with new incoming trajectory data as road networks change in real time.