On the Spatio-temporal Information Content and Arithmetic Coding of Discrete Trajectories
Markus Koegel, Martin Mauve · Lecture notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering · 2012
The trace of a moving object is commonly referred to as a trajectory. This paper considers the spatio-temporal information content of a discrete trajectory in relation to a movement prediction model for the object under consideration. The information content is the minimal amount of information necessary to reconstruct the trajectory, given the movement model. We show how the information content of arbitrary trajectories can be determined and use these findings to derive an approximative arithmetic coding scheme for trajectory information, reaching a level of compression that is close to the bound provided by its entropy. We then demonstrate the practical applicability of our ideas by using them to compress real-world vehicular trajectories, showing that this vastly improves upon the results provided by the best existing schemes. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.