Automatic generation of road network map from massive GPS, vehicle trajectories

Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) and navigation systems usually demand good timeliness on their used vector road network maps. Unfortunately, existing methods for road network map generation, such as the surveying method and the satellite image digitizing method, are difficult to generate up-to-date road network maps. This paper presents a method for automatic generation of road network map from massive GPS vehicle trajectories, which can generate the up-to-date road network map from the up-to-date GPS vehicle trajectory data that can be widely available. Given a set of GPS vehicle trajectory data, the input first is processed to construct a road network bitmap which depicts the road network. Then the road network skeleton on the bitmap is computed. Finally, the road network graph extraction is implemented on the skeleton to generate the vector road network map data. To evaluate the presented method, we implemented and tested it on the massive GPS vehicle trajectory data collected in Jilin City, China. The test results demonstrate that the presented method can be promising in applications.