Integrated use of spatial and semantic relationships for extracting road networks from floating car data

The update frequency of digital road maps influences the quality of road-dependent services. However, digital road maps surveyed by probe vehicles or extracted from remotely sensed images still have a long updating circle and their cost remain high. With GPS technology and wireless communication technology maturing and their cost decreasing, floating car technology has been used in traffic monitoring and management, and the dynamic positioning data from floating cars become a new data source for updating road maps. In this paper, we aim to update digital road maps using the floating car data from China's National Commercial Vehicle Monitoring Platform, and present an incremental road network extraction method suitable for the platform's GPS data whose sampling frequency is low and which cover a large area. Based on both spatial and semantic relationships between a trajectory point and its associated road segment, the method classifies each trajectory point, and then merges every trajectory point into the candidate road network through the adding or modifying process according to its type. The road network is gradually updated until all trajectories have been processed. Finally, this method is applied in the updating process of major roads in North China and the experimental results reveal that it can accurately derive geometric information of roads under various scenes. This paper provides a highly-efficient, low-cost approach to update digital road maps.

► China set up a vehicle monitoring platform providing nationwide floating car data.
► For updating road maps, floating car data are cheaper and update faster.
► We propose a method of extracting road networks from floating car data.
► The experiment results validate the effectiveness of the presented method.
► We provide a highly-efficient and low-cost approach to update digital road maps.