Benefiting from recent advantages in location-aware technologies, movement data are becoming ubiquitous. Hence, numerous research topics with respect to movement data have been undertaken. Yet, the research of dynamic interactions in movement data is still in its infancy. In this paper, we propose a hybrid approach combining the multi-temporal scale spatio-temporal network (MTSSTN) and the continuous triangular model (CTM) for exploring dynamic interactions in movement data. The approach mainly includes four steps: first, the relative trajectory calculus (RTC) is used to derive three types of interaction patterns; second, for each interaction pattern, a corresponding MTSSTN is generated; third, for each MTSSTN, the interaction intensity measures and three centrality measures (i.e., degree, betweenness and closeness) are calculated; finally, the results are visualized at multiple temporal scales using the CTM and analyzed based on the generated CTM diagrams. Based on the proposed approach, three distinctive aims can be achieved for each interaction pattern at multiple temporal scales: (1) exploring the interaction intensities between any two individuals; (2) exploring the interaction intensities among multiple individuals, and (3) exploring the importance of each individual and identifying the most important individuals. The movement data obtained from a real football match are used as a case study to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach is useful in exploring dynamic interactions in football movement data and discovering insightful information.
Automatic extraction of built-up areas from very high-resolution (VHR) satellite images has received increasing attention in recent years. However, due to the complexity of spectral and spatial characteristics of built-up areas, it is still a challenging task to obtain their precise location and extent. In this study, a patch-based framework was proposed for unsupervised extraction of built-up areas from VHR imagery. First, a group of corner-constrained overlapping patches were defined to locate the candidate built-up areas. Second, for each patch, its salient textures and structural characteristics were represented as a feature vector using integrated high-frequency wavelet coefficients. Then, inspired by visual perception, a patch-level saliency model of built-up areas was constructed by incorporating Gestalt laws of proximity and similarity, which can effectively describe the spatial relationships between patches. Finally, built-up areas were extracted through thresholding and their boundaries were refined by morphological operations. The performance of the proposed method was evaluated on two VHR image datasets. The resulting average F-measure values were 0.8613 for the Google Earth dataset and 0.88 for the WorldView-2 dataset, respectively. Compared with existing models, the proposed method obtains better extraction results, which show more precise boundaries and preserve better shape integrity.
Human mobility, encompassing the movement of individuals and/or groups across space and time, significantly impacts various aspects of society, with intra-urban mobility being a major research focus of scholars in diverse disciplines. Bike-sharing systems have become an alternatives in cities for achieving more sustainable transportation. Hence, bike-sharing-related data are considered an important data source to study intra-urban human mobility. To better understand human mobility in cities, it is essential to characterize the typical patterns involved in intra-urban human mobility. This paper mainly focuses on characterizing the temporal patterns of intra-urban human mobility on bike-sharing based on the trip information of the acquired bike-sharing data. To achieve this, on the one hand, we adopted an exploratory data analysis (EDA) method to describe the temporal patterns by performing exploratory analyses of bike-sharing trips. On the other hand, we used the continuous triangular model (CTM) to conduct multi-temporal-scale analysis of bike-sharing trips for further explorations of the temporal patterns where necessary. The data of bike-sharing trips in Shanghai, China, were adopted as the dataset for the case study. Generally, the study was conducted at two different levels: the trip level and the bike level. Specifically, at each level, the explorations were conducted from varying perspectives. According to the analyses, numerous meaningful temporal patterns were discovered, and several distinctive findings were acquired. The results of this study show the effectiveness of the EDA and CTM methods in characterizing temporal patterns of intra-urban human mobility, based on which potentially insightful information and suggestions can be provided to assist related actions.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are considered a significant factor that results in climate change. To better support the formulation of effective policies to reduce CO2 emissions, specific types of important emission patterns need to be considered. Motivated by the flock pattern that exists in the domain of moving object trajectories, this paper extends this concept to a geographical flock pattern and aims to discover such patterns that might exist in CO2 emission data. To achieve this, a spatiotemporal graph (STG)-based approach is proposed. Three main parts are involved in the proposed approach: generating attribute trajectories from CO2 emission data, generating STGs from attribute trajectories, and discovering specific types of geographical flock patterns. Generally, eight different types of geographical flock patterns are derived based on two criteria, i.e., the high–low attribute values criterion and the extreme number–duration values criterion. A case study is conducted based on the CO2 emission data in China on two levels: the province level and the geographical region level. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in discovering geographical flock patterns of CO2 emissions and provide potential suggestions and insights to assist policy making and the coordinated control of carbon emissions.
Movement pattern mining is a key focus in movement data research, with moving flock patterns holding particular significance due to their potential to reveal valuable insights across various domains. This research aimed to discover moving flock patterns in movement data. To achieve this, we first developed a more precise definition of a moving flock by refining the existing definitions. Then, we proposed a taxonomy of flock patterns, enabling the derivation of distinct types of moving flock patterns. Finally, we developed a Reeb graph-based approach to discover desired moving flock patterns. The effectiveness of the approach was validated using movement data obtained from a real football match. In the results, 72 and 94 moving flock patterns were discovered under different cases, respectively. Moreover, the proportion of desired moving flock patterns in these cases was 29.17% and 24.47%, respectively. The results show that the proposed approach effectively detects the desired moving flock patterns, and the findings provide insightful information to sports professionals.