一种非凸包边界约束不规则三角网生成算法

数字高程模型(DEM)模拟的大多数地形区域是多种类型区域镶嵌而成的复合体,且子区域的边界一般为非凸多边形,即三角网受到边界的约束。而目前已有的各种Delaunay三角网构网算法生成的不规则三角网的边界都是区域内采样点集的凸包,不能表达复合区域和边界为非凸多边形的区域。本文作者对三角网扩张法作了扩展,使之能够在任意多边形所包围的区域内生成不规则三角网。扩展后的算法具有步骤简单、适合任意多边形边界内生成不规则三角网的优点,而且该算法可用于"分块"式生成数据量较大的三角网,同时保证各"分块"之间完整的邻接关系。     

A spatial parallel heuristic approach for solving very large‐scale vehicle routing problems

The vehicle routing problem (VRP) is one of the most prominent problems in spatial optimization because of its broad applications in both the public and private sectors. This article presents a novel spatial parallel heuristic approach for solving large‐scale VRPs with capacity constraints. A spatial partitioning strategy is devised to divide a region of interest into a set of small spatial cells to allow the use of a parallel local search with a spatial neighbor reduction strategy. An additional local search and perturbation mechanism around the border area of spatial cells is used to improve route segments across spatial cells to overcome the border effect. The results of one man‐made VRP benchmark and three real‐world super‐large‐scale VRP instances with tens of thousands of nodes verify that the presented spatial parallel heuristic approach achieves a comparable solution with much less computing time.     

An enhanced strategy for GNSS data processing of massive networks

Although the computational burden of global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) data processing is nowadays already a big challenge, especially for huge networks, integrated processing of denser networks with data of multi-GNSS and multi-frequency is desired in the expectation of more accurate and reliable products. Based on the concept of carrier range, in this study, the precise point positioning with integer ambiguity resolution is engaged to obtain the integer ambiguities for converting carrier phases to carrier ranges. With such carrier ranges and pseudo-ranges, rigorous integrated processing is realized computational efficiently for the orbit and clock estimation using massive networks. The strategy is validated in terms of computational efficiency and product quality using data of the IGS network with about 460 stations. The experimental validation shows that the computation time of the new strategy increases gradually with the number of stations. It takes about 14 min for precise orbit and clock determination with 460 stations, while the current strategy needs about 82 min. The overlapping orbit RMS is reduced from 27.6 mm with 100 stations to 24.8 mm using the proposed strategy, and the RMS could be further reduced to 23.2 mm by including all 460 stations. Therefore, the new strategy could be applied to massive networks of multi-GNSS and multi-frequency receivers and possibly to achieve GNSS data products of higher quality.     

A spatial‐knowledge‐enhanced heuristic for solving the p‐median problem

The p‐median problem (PMP) is one of the most applied location problems in urban and regional planning. As an NP‐hard problem, the PMP remains challenging to solve optimally, especially for large‐sized problems. A number of heuristics have been developed to obtain PMP solutions in a fast manner. Among the heuristics, the Teitz and Bart (TB) algorithm has been found effective for finding high‐quality solutions. In this article, we present a spatial‐knowledge‐enhanced Teitz and Bart (STB) heuristic method for solving PMPs. The STB heuristic prioritizes candidate facility sites to be examined in the solution set based on the spatial distribution of demand and service provision. Tests based on a range of PMPs demonstrate the effectiveness of the STB heuristic. This new algorithm can be incorporated into current commercial GIS packages to solve a wide range of location‐allocation problems.     

Detection of clusters in traffic networks based on spatio‐temporal flow modeling

Spatio‐temporal clustering is a highly active research topic and a challenging issue in spatio‐temporal data mining. Many spatio‐temporal clustering methods have been designed for geo‐referenced time series. Under some special circumstances, such as monitoring traffic flow on roads, existing methods cannot handle the temporally dynamic and spatially heterogeneous correlations among road segments when detecting clusters. Therefore, this article develops a spatio‐temporal flow‐based approach to detect clusters in traffic networks. First, a spatio‐temporal flow process is modeled by combining network topology relations with real‐time traffic status. On this basis, spatio‐temporal neighborhoods are captured by considering traffic time‐series similarity in spatio‐temporal flows. Spatio‐temporal clusters are further formed by successive connection of spatio‐temporal neighbors. Experiments on traffic time series of central London's road network on both weekdays and weekends are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness and practicality of the proposed method.     

高分辨率卫星影像车辆检测的抗体网络

将车辆检测的过程视为一种“抗体”检测“危险抗原”的过程, 其中车辆是“危险抗原”, 车辆检测模板是“抗体”。利用一些车辆图像作为训练样本, 建立一种抗体网络学习并获取一组优化的“抗体”。这些“抗体”经过与待测影像的匹配, 实现对道路车辆目标的有效提取。采用0.6m分辨率的QuickBird全色数据进行实验, 实验结果验证了该方法的有效性和可行性。     

An approach for instantaneous ambiguity resolution for medium- to long-range multiple reference station networks

Integer ambiguity resolution (AR) is a prerequisite for all high-precision (centimetre level) GPS applications that utilise multiple reference station (MRS) networks. However, due to the presence of distance-dependent GPS errors, notably atmospheric refraction, AR across the network is difficult on an epoch-by-epoch basis, especially for medium- to long-range (typically 30–130 km as used here) MRS networks. This paper presents an approach for medium- to long-range instantaneous AR for MRS networks, based on an ionosphere-weighted observation model and network geometry constraints, along with a multiple ambiguity validation test procedure. The performance of the proposed method was demonstrated through two case-study examples from Australia and Norway. Our test results show that the instantaneous AR success rate varied from 93% (131 km baseline) to 98% (35 km baseline). It is also shown that the adopted high-precision prediction models for the double-difference (DD) ionospheric delay and residual tropospheric zenith delay (RTZD) are of benefit to the high success rate of the network AR. Due to its epoch-by-epoch nature, the proposed approach is insensitive to cycle-slips, rising or setting satellites, or loss-of-lock.     

An iterative approach based on contextual information for matching multi‐scale polygonal object datasets

Object matching facilitates spatial data integration, updating, evaluation, and management. However, data to be matched often originate from different sources and present problems with regard to positional discrepancies and different levels of detail. To resolve these problems, this article designs an iterative matching framework that effectively combines the advantages of the contextual information and an artificial neural network. The proposed method can correctly aggregate one‐to‐many (1:N) and many‐to‐many (M:N) potential matching pairs using contextual information in the presence of positional discrepancies and a high spatial distribution density. This method iteratively detects new landmark pairs (matched pairs), based on the prior landmark pairs as references, until all landmark pairs are obtained. Our approach has been experimentally validated using two topographic datasets at 1:50 and 1:10k. It outperformed a method based on a back‐propagation neural network. The precision increased by 4.5% and the recall increased by 21.6%, respectively.     

An electromagnetic approach based on neural networks for the GPR investigation of buried cylinders

In this letter, neural networks (NNs) are used to reconstruct the geometric and dielectric characteristics of buried cylinders. The NN is designed to work with input data extracted from the transient electric fields scattered by the target. To this aim, a simple simulation of a typical ground-penetrating radar setting is performed and different sets of data examined. Moreover, different neural network algorithms have been exploited, and results have been compared. Finally, the "robustness" of the proposed approach has been tested against noisy data and against uncertainties in the modelization.     

Path segmentation for movement trajectories with irregular sampling frequency using space‐time interpolation and density‐based spatial clustering

Path segmentation methods have been developed to distinguish stops and moves along movement trajectories. However, most studies do not focus on handling irregular sampling frequency of the movement data. This article proposes a four‐step method to handle various time intervals between two consecutive records, including parameter setting, space‐time interpolation, density‐based spatial clustering, and integrating the geographic context. The article uses GPS tracking data provided by HOURCAR, a non‐profit car‐sharing service in Minnesota, as a case study to demonstrate our method and present the results. We also implement the DB‐SMoT algorithm as a comparison. The results show that our four‐step method can handle various time intervals between consecutive records, group consecutive stops close to each other, and distinguish different types of stops and their inferred activities. These results can provide novel insights into car‐sharing behaviors such as trip purposes and activity scheduling.     

Framework for constructing multimodal transport networks and routing using a graph database: A case study in London

Most prior multimodal transport networks have been organized as relational databases with multilayer structures to support transport management and routing; however, database expandability and update efficiency in new networks and timetables are low due to the strict database schemas. This study aimed to develop multimodal transport networks using a graph database that can accommodate efficient updates and extensions, high relation-based query performance, and flexible integration in multimodal routing. As a case study, a database was constructed for London transport networks, and routing tests were performed under various conditions. The constructed multimodal graph database showed stable performance in processing iterative queries, and efficient multi-stop routing was particularly enhanced. By applying the proposed framework, databases for multimodal routing can be readily constructed for other regions, while enabling responses to diversified routings, such as personalized routing through integration with various unstructured information, due to the flexible schema of the graph database.     

A spatial‐temporal‐semantic approach for detecting local events using geo‐social media data

Social media networks allow users to post what they are involved in with location information in a real‐time manner. It is therefore possible to collect large amounts of information related to local events from existing social networks. Mining this abundant information can feed users and organizations with situational awareness to make responsive plans for ongoing events. Despite the fact that a number of studies have been conducted to detect local events using social media data, the event content is not efficiently summarized and/or the correlation between abnormal neighboring regions is not investigated. This article presents a spatial‐temporal‐semantic approach to local event detection using geo‐social media data. Geographical regularities are first measured to extract spatio‐temporal outliers, of which the corresponding tweet content is automatically summarized using the topic modeling method. The correlation between outliers is subsequently examined by investigating their spatial adjacency and semantic similarity. A case study on the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) is conducted using Twitter data to evaluate our approach. This reveals that up to 87% of the events detected are correctly identified compared with the official TIFF schedule. This work is beneficial for authorities to keep track of urban dynamics and helps build smart cities by providing new ways of detecting what is happening in them.     

A multi‐criteria decision‐making approach for geometric matching of areal objects

We propose a method for geometric areal object matching based on multi‐criteria decision making. To enable this method, we focused on determining the matched areal object pairs that have all relations, one‐to‐one relationships to many‐to‐many relationships, in different spatial data sets by fusing geometric criteria without user invention. First, we identified candidate corresponding areal object pairs with a graph‐based approach in training data. Second, three matching criteria (areal hausdorff distance, intersection ratio, and turning function distance) were calculated in candidate corresponding pairs and these criteria were normalized. Third, the shape similarity was calculated by weighted linear combination using the normalized matching criteria (similarities) with the criteria importance through intercriteria correlation method. Fourth, a threshold (0.738) of the shape similarity estimated in the plot of precision versus recall versus all possible thresholds of training data was applied, and the matched pairs were determined and identified. Finally, we visually validated the detection of similar areal feature pairs and conducted statistical evaluation using precision, recall, and F‐measure values from a confusion matrix. Their values were 0.905, 0.848, and 0.876, respectively. These results validate that the proposed classifier, which detects 87.6% of matched areal pairs, is highly accurate.     

A topographically preserved road‐network tile model and optimal routing method for virtual globes

Virtual globes enable the combination of heterogeneous datasets for optimal routing analyses in transportation, environmental ecology, and construction engineering. In this study, considering the advantages of the hierarchical tiling structure and topography of virtual globes, we propose a tile‐based optimal routing method for large‐scale road networks in a virtual globe. This method designs a topographically preserved road‐network tile model by partitioning roads into tiles and constructs the road‐network pyramid from the bottom to the top. During construction, a TileArc is calculated and flagged as the shortest path in a tile. Based on the built road‐network pyramid carrying hierarchical TileArcs, a multi‐level and flexible shortest path query can be executed efficiently. The proposed method is implemented with large road networks with different road grades in a virtual globe. Experimental results verify its validity, efficiency, and exactness. Moreover, the length of the shortest path with surface distance is approximately 1.3 times longer than that with Euclidean distance.     

An adaptive method for clustering spatio‐temporal events

The clustering of spatio‐temporal events has become one of the most important research branches of spatio‐temporal data mining. However, the discovery of clusters of spatio‐temporal events with different shapes and densities remains a challenging problem because of the subjectivity in the choice of two critical parameters: the spatio‐temporal window for estimating the density around each event, and the density threshold for evaluating the significance of clusters. To make the clustering of spatio‐temporal events objective, in this study these two parameters were adaptively generated from statistical information about the dataset. More precisely, the density threshold was statistically modeled as an adjusted significance level controlled by the cardinality and support domain of the dataset, and the appropriate sizes of spatio‐temporal windows for clustering were determined by the spatio‐temporal classification entropy and stability analysis. Experiments on both simulated and earthquake datasets were conducted, and the results show that the proposed method can identify clusters of different shapes and densities.     

A multi‐modal transportation data‐driven approach to identify urban functional zones: An exploration based on Hangzhou City,China

Recent urban studies have used human mobility data such as taxi trajectories and smartcard data as a complementary way to identify the social functions of land use. However, little work has been conducted to reveal how multi‐modal transportation data impact on this identification process. In our study, we propose a data‐driven approach that addresses the relationships between travel behavior and urban structure: first, multi‐modal transportation data are aggregated to extract explicit statistical features; then, topic modeling methods are applied to transform these explicit statistical features into latent semantic features; and finally, a classification method is used to identify functional zones with similar latent topic distributions. Two 10‐day‐long “big” datasets from the 2,370 bicycle stations of the public bicycle‐sharing system, and up to 9,992 taxi cabs within the core urban area of Hangzhou City, China, as well as point‐of‐interest data are tested to reveal the extent to which different travel modes contribute to the detection and understanding of urban land functions. Our results show that: (1) using latent semantic features delineated from the topic modeling process as the classification input outperforms approaches using explicit statistical features; (2) combining multi‐modal data visibly improves the accuracy and consistency of the identified functional zones; and (3) the proposed data‐driven approach is also capable of identifying mixed land use in the urban space. This work presents a novel attempt to uncover the hidden linkages between urban transportation patterns with urban land use and its functions.     

Optimal spatial data matching for conflation: A network flow‐based approach

Spatial data conflation involves the matching and merging of counterpart features in multiple datasets. It has applications in practical spatial analysis in a variety of fields. Conceptually, the feature‐matching problem can be viewed as an optimization problem of seeking a match plan that minimizes the total discrepancy between datasets. In this article, we propose a powerful yet efficient optimization model for feature matching based on the classic network flow problem in operations research. We begin with a review of the existing optimization‐based methods and point out limitations of current models. We then demonstrate how to utilize the structure of the network‐flow model to approach the feature‐matching problem, as well as the important factors for designing optimization‐based conflation models. The proposed model can be solved by general linear programming solvers or network flow solvers. Due to the network flow formulation we adopt, the proposed model can be solved in polynomial time. Computational experiments show that the proposed model significantly outperforms existing optimization‐based conflation models. We conclude with a summary of findings and point out directions of future research.     

MaskMy.XYZ: An easy‐to‐use tool for protecting geoprivacy using geographic masks

Geographic masks are techniques used to protect privacy when publishing sensitive data in maps, but are not well adopted among researchers and may be difficult to execute for some GIS users. We developed a client‐side web application called MaskMy.XYZ that makes geographic masking easy to perform. It executes donut geomasking, a well‐known geographic mask, on thousands of points in seconds, and visualizes the original and masked point patterns in an integrated web map for visual comparison. MaskMy.XYZ also features metrics for both privacy protection and information loss, and allows users to rapidly and iteratively adjust masking parameters based on these metrics. The user interface was designed to prioritize usability, and clear documentation has been included to educate users about geographic masks, which is otherwise only found in niche literatures. By developing this application, we hope that geographic masks will be more widely adopted such that privacy is better protected in research.     

Asynchronous Geospatial Processing: An Event‐Driven Push‐Based Architecture for the OGC Web Processing Service

Geospatial processing tasks like solar potential analyses or floodplain investigations within flood scenarios are often complex and deal with large amounts of data. If such analysis operations are performed in distributed web‐based systems, technical capabilities are mostly not sufficient. Major shortcomings comprise the potentially long execution times and the vast amount of messaging overhead that arise from common poll‐based approaches. To overcome these issues, an approach for an event‐driven architecture for web‐based geospatial processing is proposed within this article. First, this article presents a thorough qualitative discussion of different available technologies for push‐based notifications. The aim of this discussion is to find the most suitable push‐based messaging technologies for application with OGC Web Processing Services (WPS). Based on this, an event‐driven architecture for asynchronous geospatial processing with the WPS is presented, building on the Web Socket Protocol as the transport protocol and the OGC Event Service as the message‐oriented middleware. The proposed architecture allows pushing notifications to clients once a task has completed. This paradigm enables the efficient execution of web‐based geospatial processing tasks as well as the integration of geographical analyses into event‐driven real‐time workflows.     

An appearance‐preserving simplification method for complex 3D building models

The simplification of 3D building models to effectively reduce model complexity and improve rendering efficiency is an important component of 3D GIS. To reduce the data volume while preserving the model appearance, this article proposes a novel simplification method for complex 3D building models. Texture discontinuities are addressed by developing a new data model that records the mapping relation between the texture coordinates of each vertex and its neighboring triangles. The surface mesh of the building model is then segmented into regions, guided by topology and appearance. Finally, the mesh segmentation information is used to derive an improved error metric that considers both geometric and texture errors, and the texture coordinates are adjusted after each simplification operation. A series of comparative experiments alongside traditional methods demonstrates that our approach achieves a good balance between geometric fidelity and texture preservation, and produces simplified 3D building models with better visual quality.