Reactive buffering window trajectory segmentation: RBW-TS

Mobility data of a moving object, called trajectory data, are continuously generated by vessel navigation systems, wearable devices, and drones, to name a few. Trajectory data consist of samples that include temporal, spatial, and other descriptive features of object movements. One of the main challenges in trajectory data analysis is to divide trajectory data into meaningful segments based on certain criteria. Most of the available segmentation algorithms are limited to processing data offline, i.e., they cannot segment a stream of trajectory samples. In this work, we propose an approach called Reactive Buffering Window - Trajectory Segmentation (RBW-TS), which partitions trajectory data into segments while receiving a stream of trajectory samples. Another novelty compared to existing work is that the proposed algorithm is based on multidimensional features of trajectories, and it can incorporate as many relevant features of the underlying trajectory as needed. This makes RBW-TS general and applicable to numerous domains by simply selecting trajectory features relevant for segmentation purposes. The proposed online algorithm incurs lower computational and memory requirements. Furthermore, it is robust to noisy samples and outliers. We validate RBW-TS on three use cases: (a) segmenting human-movement trajectories in different modes of transportation, (b) segmenting trajectories generated by vessels in the maritime domain, and (c) segmenting human-movement trajectories in a commercial shopping center. The numerical results detailed in the paper demonstrate that (i) RBW-TS is capable of detecting the true breakpoints of segments in all three usecases while processing a stream of trajectory points; (ii) despite low memory and computational requirements, the performance in terms of the harmonic mean of purity and coverage is comparable to that of state-of-the-art batch and online algorithms; (iii) RBW-TS achieves different levels of accuracy depending on the various internal parameter estimation methods used; and (iv) RBW-TS can tackle real-world trajectory data for segmentation purposes.