Map-Matching Compatible with Junction Adjusting in Vehicle Navigation System

In this paper, a map-matching (MM) algorithm which combines an estimated position with digital road data is proposed. The presented algorithm using a virtual track is appropriate for a MEMS-based pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) system, which can be used in mobile devices. Most of the previous MM algorithms are for car navigation systems and GPS-based navigation system, so existing MM algorithms are not appropriate for the pure DR-based pedestrian navigation system. The biggest problem of previous MM algorithms is that they cannot determine the correct road segment (link) due to the DR characteristics. In DR-based navigation system, the current position is propagated from the previous estimated position. This means that the MM result can be placed on a wrong link when MM algorithm fails to decide the correct link at once. It is a critical problem. Previous algorithms never overcome this problem because they did not consider pure DR characteristics. The MM algorithm using the virtual track is proposed to overcome this problem with improved accuracy. Performance of the proposed MM algorithm was verified by experiments.

In this research, a passenger-centric passenger information system is proposed, which uses crowd sourcing and mobile phones so that passengers are not only information consumers but are also providers of information to the system. Passengers can allow the system to track their location through their smart phones when they are traveling on public transportation; this will compensate for the lack of a vehicle tracking system in public transportation, particularly in nonurban areas. Map-matching (MM) algorithms integrate location data (i.e.,latitude and longitude) obtained from positioning sensors (in this case, mobile GPS) with a digital geographic information system (GIS) road map. Any map-matching algorithm first identifies the road link on which a vehicle is traveling and then determines the vehicle's location on that road segment. In the proposed information system, at a given point of time, a number of vehicle locations (latitude and longitude) are received from passengers traveling on a bus. In order to provide a precise vehicle location at a given point of time, a novel map-matching algorithm using fuzzy logic, which integrates multiple vehicle locations (obtained from passenger's smart phones) with a GIS road map, has been developed. The developed map-matching algorithm was tested using real-world data collected on four different bus routes in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, and also GPS data collected in and around Nottingham, United Kingdom. It was identified that the developed MM algorithm is efficient and capable of supporting the proposed passenger information system. (C) 2013 American Society of Civil Engineers.

With the increasing availability of GPS-equipped mobile devices, location-based services have become an integral part of everyday life. Among one of the initial steps of positioning data management, map matching aims to reduce the uncertainty in a trajectory by matching the GPS points to the road network on a digital map. Most existing work has focused on estimating the likelihood of a candidate route based on the GPS observations, while neglecting to model the probability of a route choice from the perspective of drivers. In this work, we propose a novel feature-based map matching algorithm that estimates the cost of a candidate route based on both GPS observations and human factors. To take human factors into consideration is highly important, especially when dealing with low sampling rate data where most of the movement details are lost. Additionally, we simultaneously analyze a subsequence of coherent GPS points by utilizing a new segment-based probabilistic map matching strategy, which is less susceptible to the noisiness of the positioning data. We have evaluated both the offline and the online versions of our proposed approach on a public large-scale GPS dataset, which consists of 100 trajectories distributed all over the world. The experimental results show that our method is robust to sparse data with large sampling intervals (e.g., 60s ∼ 300s) and challenging track features (e.g., u-turns and loops). Measurements including map matching accuracy and system efficiency have been thoroughly evaluated and discussed. Compared with two state-of-the-art map matching algorithms, our method substantially reduces the route mismatch error by 6.4% ∼ 32.3% (either offline or online with the window size set to 360s), with a slight increase in terms of the processing time. The experimental results show that our proposed method obtains the state-of-the-art map matching results in all the different combinations of sampling rates and challenging features.

Map-Matching Poor-Quality GPS Data in Urban Environments: The pgMapMatch Package

GPS (Global Positioning System) has become an integral part of a vehicle system which provides speed, time, direction etc besides the navigation data. Speed is one of the primary attributes of vehicle accident. Many lives could have been saved if emergency service could receive accident information timely. This paper proposes to detect an accident from the map matched position of a vehicle by utilizing the GPS speed data and map matching algorithm and send accident location to an Alert Service Center. The GPS provides speed and position in every 0.1 second. The position data will be used in the map matching algorithm to locate the vehicle on the road. The present speed will be compared with the previous speed in every 0.1 second through a Microcontroller Unit. Whenever the speed will be falling below the safe calculated threshold speed, the system will generate an accident situation. It will check the vehicle location from map matching module and generate an accident situation if the vehicle is found outside the road network. This will reduce the false accident detection drastically. The map matched accident location is then sent by utilizing the GSM network. The proposed system will save many accident victims with timely rescue.

Joint Charging and Routing Optimization for Electric Vehicle Navigation Systems

The global positioning system (GPS) trajectory data are extensively utilized in various fields, such as driving behavior analysis, vehicle navigation systems, and traffic management. GPS sensors installed in numerous driving recorders and smartphones facilitate data collection on a large-scale in a high-frequency manner. Therefore, map-matching algorithms are indispensable to identify the GPS trajectories on a road network. Although the local map-matching algorithm reduces computation time, it lacks sufficient accuracy. Conversely, the global map-matching algorithm enhances matching accuracy; however, the computations are time consuming in the case of large-scale data. Therefore, this study proposes a method to improve the accuracy of the local map-matching algorithm without affecting its efficiency. The proposed method first executes the incremental map-matching algorithm. It then identifies the mismatching links in the results based on the connectivity of the links. Finally, the shortest path algorithm and the longest common subsequence are used to correct these error links. An elderly driver’s driving recorder data were used to conduct the experiment to compare the proposed method with four state-of-the-art map-matching algorithms in terms of accuracy and efficiency. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method can significantly increase the accuracy and efficiency of the map-matching process when considering high-frequency and large-scale data. Particularly, compared with the two-benchmark global map-matching algorithms, the proposed method can reduce the error rate of map-matching by nearly half, only consuming 18% and 58% of the computation time of the two global algorithms, respectively.

Parallelization is the key method to speedup advanced driving assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicle applications especially using emerging multicore and manycore processors. Localization and map matching are among the fundamental parts of such applications. This paper presents a parallel implementation and performance analysis of particle filter based vehicle localization and map-matching algorithm both on a multicore processor using Open Multi-Processing (OpenMP) and on a graphics processing unit (GPU) using the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA). In the proposed implementation, GPS and odometer data is fused with digital map information. Tests were performed on real data captured in vehicle environment comprising various speed and road conditions. Test results show that speedups up to 75 times can be achieved on parallel GPU implementation over sequential counterpart. As this speedup complies with real-time performance requirements, high computational cost of using map topology information with large number of particles in particle filter implementation is proven to be handled by emerging technologies. The effect of number of particles on error rate of localization and map matching is also investigated.

Map Matching Algorithm for Real-Time Data Processing of Non-route GPS Data in Seoul

Map matching is the process of finding a match for each GPS point in a vehicle's trajectory to roads on a digital map. Extensive research has been conducted during the last years yielding many algorithms based on different approaches. One of the challenges that face those algorithms is the interruption of GPS signals that occurs specially in dense urban environments. In these cases on-board sensors like odometers and accelerometers can be used temporarily for positioning, however due to the poor accuracy of these methods, the quality of map matching decreases significantly. In this paper, we propose a method that improves the quality of map matching when GPS signals are not available. This method is based on a particle filter using heading and velocity measurement. We evaluate this method through its integration with an existing topological map matching algorithm. We compare the performances when this algorithm is used alone and when associated with the particle filter.

The process of map matching takes a sequence of possibly noisy GPS coordinates from a vehicle trace and estimates the actual road positions---a crucial first step needed by many GPS applications. There has been a plethora of methods for map matching published, but most of them are evaluated on low-noise datasets obtained from a planned route. And comparisons with other methods are very limited. Based on our previous unifying framework used to catalog different mathematical formulas in many published methods, we evaluate representative algorithms using the low-noise dataset from the GIS Cup 2012 and a high-noise dataset collected from Shanghai downtown. Our experiments reveal that global max-weight and global geometrical map matching methods are the most accurate, but each has its weaknesses. We therefore propose a new map matching algorithm that integrates Fréchet distance with global weight optimization, which is more accurate across all sampling intervals.

Precise navigation is a vital need for many modern vehicular applications. The global positioning system (GPS) cannot provide continuous navigation information in urban areas. The widely used inertial navigation system (INS) can provide full vehicle state at high rates. However, the accuracy diverges quickly in low cost microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) based INS due to bias, drift, noise, and other errors. These errors can be corrected in a stationary state. But detecting stationary state is a challenging task. A novel stationary state detection technique from the variation of acceleration, heading, and pitch and roll of an attitude heading reference system (AHRS) built from the inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensors is proposed. Besides, the map matching (MM) algorithm detects the intersections where the vehicle is likely to stop. Combining these two results, the stationary state is detected with a smaller timing window of 3 s. A longer timing window of 5 s is used when the stationary state is detected only from the AHRS. The experimental results show that the stationary state is correctly identified and the position error is reduced to 90% and outperforms previously reported work. The proposed algorithm would help to reduce INS errors and enhance the performance of the navigation system.

The computation speed and output latency of map matching are important considerations when processing location data, especially smartphone-generated noisy and sparse data, from a large number of users for real-time transportation applications. In this paper, we examine the factors affecting the efficiency of online map matching algorithms that are based on probabilistic sequence models such as Hidden Markov Models (HMM) and present several heuristic optimizations to improve their speed and latency. As shortest path computations account for most of the running time of probabilistic map matching algorithms, we propose a method for reducing the total number of such computations by pruning unlikely states in the probabilistic sequence model. Furthermore, we speed up the one-to-many shortest path computations by limiting the search space to an elliptical area that encompasses all the targeted destinations. We present a technique for reducing the latency of the Viterbi algorithm used to find the most likely state sequence in a HMM or a similar model. This technique enables the early output of partial state sequences based on an estimate of the probability of a state being part of the eventual most likely sequence. Experiments using real-world location data show that the heuristic optimizations significantly reduce the running time and output latency with negligible loss of accuracy.

BackgroundZygomatic implants are widely used in the rehabilitation of severely atrophic maxillae, but implant placement is not without risks, and it can potentially cause damage to related anatomical structures. The aim of this study was to perform a comparative analysis of the accuracy of static navigation systems in placing zygomatic dental implants in comparison to dynamic navigation systems.MethodsSixty zygomatic dental implants were randomly allocated to one of three study groups, categorized by which implant placement strategy was used: A: computer-aided static navigation system (n = 20) (GI); B: computer-aided dynamic navigation system (n = 20) (NI); or C: free-hand technique (n = 20) (FHI). For the computer-aided study groups, a preoperative cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) scan of the existing situation was performed in order to plan the approach to be used during surgery. Four zygomatic dental implants were inserted in each of fifteen polyurethane stereolithographic models (n = 15), with a postoperative CBCT scan taken after the intervention. The pre- and postoperative CBCT scans were then uploaded to a software program used in dental implantology to analyze the angular deviations, apical end point, and coronal entry point. Student’s t-test was used to analyze the results.ResultsThe results found statistically significant differences in apical end-point deviations between the FHI and NI (p = 0.0053) and FHI and GI (p = 0.0004) groups. There were also statistically significant differences between the angular deviations of the FHI and GI groups (p = 0.0043).ConclusionsThe manual free-hand technique may enable more accurate placement of zygomatic dental implants than computer-assisted surgical techniques due to the different learning curves required for each zygomatic dental implant placement techniques.

The car navigation service has opened through the global positioning system (GPS). People's lives have changed through car navigation services, and this service is indispensable nowadays. GPS provides reliable location accuracy in open space, but its location accuracy is degraded where multipath and other error factors are present. In particular, since GPS signals must be received in order to calculate the position, the navigation system cannot calculate the position in an indoor space such as underground parking lot, subway or tunnel where GPS signals are cut off. When car navigation is performed in an indoor parking lot where GPS signals are not transmitted, the user cannot calculate the current location, so the user has to go out by relying on the traffic sign because he does not know the current location. Also, when the user leave the parking lot, the car navigation system has problems. In an urban canyon, it is difficult to calculate accurate current position due to multipath. Because the route is calculated through the current location and route, the car navigation system provides the wrong route to the user. In addition, when entering a tunnel while using car navigation, the car navigation system calculates the position using the initial tunnel entry velocity estimated by the GPS. As the speed of the user increases or decreases, the position error also increases. Then the position suddenly changes when passing through the tunnel. And it is difficult to provide a proper guidance at the branch road or exit in the tunnel because of the positioning error. People are demanding a complete car navigation service, but the current navigation service provides the wrong route and position information to the user where the GPS signal quality is poor. In order to solve the above problem, in this paper, we have studied to improve the user's position accuracy by using LTE signal and mobile phone internal sensor. In general, observed time difference of arrival (OTDOA) technique is applied for the LTE based positioning. Because this method gives tens of meters of error, it is difficult to be used for the car navigation service. In our research, we estimate the position using the LTE signal strength. The difference from conventional fingerprinting method is that instead of using only current signal strength, the signal strength pattern accumulated while moving is utilized to estimate the user position. The signal strength increases as the user approach the access point (AP), and decreases as the user move away from the AP. Therefore, when a user moves and stores signal strength with respect to a specific AP, a pattern that could occur only in the corresponding region is saved. There are many similar candidates in the database when using only the current signal strength. However, when using a pattern, similar candidates exist only around the true position. And, when using several LTE signals, the positioning accuracy could be increased. Since the user receives multiple LTE signals, the pattern becomes surface. The surface is compared with the database, and the position with the highest correlation value is estimated as the current position. We call this method surface correlation (SC). In order to verify the performance of the proposed method, experiments were conducted in the Gangnam beltway tunnel in Seoul. The testbed consisted of three tunnel and total distance is almost 11.8 Km. In the tunnel, repeater and several antennas are installed to widen the area of the LTE signal. When an LTE signal is received by the vehicle, the largest signal strength is received every time when the vehicle passes the nearest antenna. As a result, for a specific LTE signal, when the vehicle has passed through the LTE signal region, a unique pattern with multiple peaks is generated. In order to estimate the position, we first estimate the position with the SC technique. Then, the estimated position is corrected by comparing the peak of the currently received pattern with the peak of the database. Through this method, the position was estimated with an error of less than 50meter in the tunnel. Conclusion In this research, the LTE signal strength based positioning technology is presented. Especially, this technology, SC, provides the positioning performance that could be used for the car navigation in the tunnel where GPS signal is blocked. We expected that user would be use the accurate car navigation service through this technology in the GPS challenging environment.