Nowadays, with the development of positioning technology, people have become able to obtain the position information of objects in the global range easily, more accurately and in large quantities. In order to reduce the amount of information about the trajectory of moving objects or the location of geographical objects, it is necessary to simplify the polyline consisting of nodes representing the location information.
The Douglas-Peucker (DP) algorithm is known as an accurate and efficient one for simplifying polyline. In order to simplify the trajectory of moving objects in the global domain with DP algorithm, geodetic distance computation in spherical space is necessary.
In the implementation of the DP algorithm on the Earth’s ellipsoid, it is impossible to avoid spending much time on geodetic distance computation, and the main problem is a huge computational effort.
Kim Song Chol, a section head at the IT Institute, has investigated the performance of DP algorithm in spherical space for trajectory simplification of moving objects.
He proposed a method of using geodetic coordinates as spherical coordinates and evaluated its accuracy. The geodetic distance error was about 0.22~0.55% of the maximum geodetic distance. With this error, the results of implementing the DP algorithm in spherical space have been experimentally found to be more accurate. In addition, the computational speed has been proved to be very fast and applicable to the global scale.
...
