Boosting Moving Object Indexing through Velocity Partitioning

There have been intense research interests in moving object indexing in the past decade. However, existing work did not exploit the important property of skewed velocity distributions. In many real world scenarios, objects travel predominantly along only a few directions. Examples include vehicles on road networks, flights, people walking on the streets, etc. The search space for a query is heavily dependent on the velocity distribution of the objects grouped in the nodes of an index tree. Motivated by this observation, we propose the velocity partitioning (VP) technique, which exploits the skew in velocity distribution to speed up query processing using moving object indexes. The VP technique first identifies the "dominant velocity axes (DVAs)" using a combination of principal components analysis (PCA) and k-means clustering. Then, a moving object index (e.g., a TPR-tree) is created based on each DVA, using the DVA as an axis of the underlying coordinate system. An object is maintained in the index whose DVA is closest to the object's current moving direction. Thus, all the objects in an index are moving in a near 1-dimensional space instead of a 2-dimensional space. As a result, the expansion of the search space with time is greatly reduced, from a quadratic function of the maximum speed (of the objects in the search range) to a near linear function of the maximum speed. The VP technique can be applied to a wide range of moving object index structures. We have implemented the VP technique on two representative ones, the TPR*-tree and the Bx-tree. Extensive experiments validate that the VP technique consistently improves the performance of those index structures.Comment: VLDB201

Efficient MaxCount and threshold operators of moving objects

Calculating operators of continuously moving objects presents some unique challenges, especially when the operators involve aggregation or the concept of congestion, which happens when the number of moving objects in a changing or dynamic query space exceeds some threshold value. This paper presents the following six d-dimensional moving object operators: (1) MaxCount (or MinCount), which finds the Maximum (or Minimum) number of moving objects simultaneously present in the dynamic query space at any time during the query time interval. (2) CountRange, which finds a count of point objects whose trajectories intersect the dynamic query space during the query time interval. (3) ThresholdRange, which finds the set of time intervals during which the dynamic query space is congested. (4) ThresholdSum, which finds the total length of all the time intervals during which the dynamic query space is congested. (5) ThresholdCount, which finds the number of disjoint time intervals during which the dynamic query space is congested. And (6) ThresholdAverage, which finds the average length of time of all the time intervals when the dynamic query space is congested. For these operators separate algorithms are given to find only estimate or only precise values. Experimental results from more than 7,500 queries indicate that the estimation algorithms produce fast, efficient results with error under 5%

Robust Moving Objects Detection in Lidar Data Exploiting Visual Cues

Detecting moving objects in dynamic scenes from sequences of lidar scans is an important task in object tracking, mapping, localization, and navigation. Many works focus on changes detection in previously observed scenes, while a very limited amount of literature addresses moving objects detection. The state-of-the-art method exploits Dempster-Shafer Theory to evaluate the occupancy of a lidar scan and to discriminate points belonging to the static scene from moving ones. In this paper we improve both speed and accuracy of this method by discretizing the occupancy representation, and by removing false positives through visual cues. Many false positives lying on the ground plane are also removed thanks to a novel ground plane removal algorithm. Efficiency is improved through an octree indexing strategy. Experimental evaluation against the KITTI public dataset shows the effectiveness of our approach, both qualitatively and quantitatively with respect to the state- of-the-art