An Experimental Evaluation of Grouping Definitions for Moving Entities

One important pattern analysis task for trajectory data is to find a group: a set of entities that travel together over a period of time. In this paper, we compare four definitions of groups by conducting extensive experiments using various data sets. The grouping definitions are different by one or more of three different characteristics: whether they use the measured sample points or the continuous movement, how distance is used to decide if entities are in the same group, and whether the duration of the group is measured cumulatively or as one contiguous time interval. We are interested in the differences between the definitions and comparisons to human annotated data, if available. We concentrate on pedestrian data and on different crowd densities. Furthermore, we analyze the robustness of the definitions and their dependence on different sampling rates. We use two different types of trajectory data sets: synthetic trajectories from a crowd simulation model, and real-life trajectories extracted from video surveillance. We present the results of the quantitative evaluations. For experiments with real-life trajectories, we augment them with a qualitative evaluation using videos that show groups in the trajectories with a color coding.