Pedestrian network map generation approaches and recommendation

With the advanced capabilities of mobile devices and the success of car navigation systems, interest in pedestrian navigation systems is on the rise. A critical component of any navigation system is a map database, which represents a network (e.g., road networks for car navigation) and supports key functionality such as map display, geocoding, and routing. Road networks, mainly due to the popularity of car navigation systems, are well defined and publicly available. However, in pedestrian navigation systems, as well as other applications including urban planning and physical activity studies, road networks do not adequately represent the paths that pedestrians usually travel. Currently, there is a void in literatures discussing the challenges, methods, and best practices for pedestrian network map generation. This coupled with the increased demand for pedestrian networks is the prime motivation for development of new approaches and algorithms to automatically generating pedestrian networks. Three approaches, network buffering, using existing road networks, collaborative mapping, using Global Positioning System (GPS) traces collected by volunteers, and image processing, using high-resolution satellite and laser imageries, were implemented and evaluated with a pedestrian network baseline as a ground truth. The results of the experiments indicate that these three approaches, while differing in complexity and outcome, are viable for automatic pedestrian network map generation. The recommendation of a suitable approach for generating pedestrian networks for a given set of sources and requirements is provided.