CoTracks: A New Lossy Compression Schema for Tracking Logs Data Based on Multiparametric Segmentation

A massive diffusion of positioning devices and services, transmitting and producing spatio-temporal data, raised space complexity problems and pulled the research focus toward efficient and specific algorithms to compress these huge amount of stored or flowing data. Co Tracks algorithm has been projected for a lossy compression of GPS data, exploiting analogies between all their spatio-temporal features. The original contribution of this algorithm is the consideration of the altitude of the track, an elaboration of 3D data and a dynamic vision of the moving point, because the speed, tightly linked to the time, is supposed to be one of the significant parameters in the uniformity search. Minimum Bounding Box has been the tool employed to group data points and to generate the key points of the approximated trajectory. The compression ratio, resulting also after a further Huffman coding, appears attractively high, suggesting new interesting developments of this new technique.