The availability of the Global Positioning System (GPS) trajectory data is increasing along with the availability of different GPS receivers and with the increasing use of various mobility services. GPS trajectory is an important data source which is used in traffic density detection, transport mode detection, mapping data inferences with the use of different methods such as image processing and machine learning methods. While the data size increases, efficient representation of this type of data is becoming difficult to be used in these methods. A common approach is the representation of GPS trajectory information such as average speed, bearing, etc. in raster image form and applying analysis methods. In this study, we evaluate GPS trajectory data rasterization using the spatial join functions of QGIS, PostGIS+QGIS, and our iterative spatial structured grid aggregation implementation coded in the Python programming language. Our implementation is also parallelizable, and this parallelization is also included as the fourth method. According to the results of experiment carried out with an example GPS trajectory dataset, QGIS method and PostGIS+QGIS method showed relatively low performance with respect to our method using the metric of total processing time. PostGIS+QGIS method achieved the best results for spatial join though its total performance decreased quickly while test area size increases. On the other hand, both of our methods' performances decrease directly proportional to GPS point. And our methods' performance can be increased proportional to the increase with the number of processor cores and/or with multiple computing clusters.
This study presents an innovative approach for automatic road detection with deep learning, by employing fusion strategies for utilizing both lower-resolution satellite imagery and GPS trajectory data, a concept never explored before. We rigorously investigate both early and late fusion strategies, and assess deep learning based road detection performance using different fusion settings. Our extensive ablation studies assess the efficacy of our framework under diverse model architectures, loss functions, and geographic domains (Istanbul and Montreal). For an unbiased and complete evaluation of road detection results, we use both region-based and boundary-based evaluation metrics for road segmentation. The outcomes reveal that the ResUnet model outperforms U-Net and D-Linknet in road extraction tasks, achieving superior results over the benchmark study using low-resolution Sentinel-2 data. This research not only contributes to the field of automatic road detection but also offers novel insights into the utilization of data fusion methods in diverse applications.