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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS
Accelerated Map Matching for GPS Trajectories
Marko Dogramadzi and Aftab Khan , Member, IEEE
Abstract— The processing and analysis of large-scale journey
trajectory data is becoming increasingly important as vehicles
become ever more prevalent and interconnected. Mapping these
trajectories onto a road network is a complex task, largely
due to the inevitable measurement error generated by GPS
sensors. Past approaches have had varying degrees of suc-
cess, but achieving high accuracy has come at the expense of
performance, memory usage, or both.In this paper, we solve
these issues by proposing a map matching algorithm based
on Hidden Markov Models (HMM). The proposed method is
shown to be more efficient when compared against a traditional
HMM based map matching method, whilst maintaining high
accuracy and eschewing any requirements for CPU-intensive and
memory-expensive pre-processing. The proposed algorithm offers
a method for significantly accelerating transition-probability
calculations using instances of high data-availability, which have
previously been a large bottleneck in map matching algorithm
performance. It is shown that this can be accomplished with
the application of road-network segmentation combined with a
spatially-aware heuristic. Experiments are performed using two
different datasets, with over 9 hours of GPS samples. We show
that the proposed framework is able to offer a reduction in
run-time of over 90% with no significant effect on the algorithm’s
accuracy when compared against the traditional HMM approach.
Index Terms— Map matching, GPS, trajectories.
I. I NTRODUCTION
M AP Matching refers to the problem of matching a series
of – potentially inaccurate – raw GPS points to a road
network. An example of this problem can be observed in car
navigation systems in which it is required to map location
coordinates received from the GPS to the car’s actual position
on the road-map displayed on the screen. Smartphone mapping
software faces the same issue, with a similar requirement of
relating the user’s GPS location to the road network when
providing a turn-by-turn navigation service.
In addition to the aforementioned applications, map match-
ing is also required for identifying road segments that have
been traversed during a journey, retrospectively. Although off-
line, this process still needs to conducted in near real-time
for example in the context of traffic-flow analysis [1], where
Manuscript received August 6, 2019; revised February 19, 2020,
June 17, 2020, and October 8, 2020; accepted November 23, 2020. This
work was supported in part by the EU REPLICATE (Renaissance of Places
with Innovative Citizenship and Technology) project under the aegis of
EU’s Horizon 2020 Programme under Grant 691735. This work is based
on a previously granted patent [26]. The Associate Editor for this article
was J. W. Choi. (Corresponding author: Aftab Khan.)
Marko Dogramadzi is with Toshiba Europe Ltd., Bristol Research and Inno-
vation Laboratory, Bristol BS1 4ND, U.K., and also with the Department of
Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 1UB,
U.K.
Aftab Khan is with Toshiba Europe Ltd., Bristol Research and Innovation
Laboratory, Bristol BS1 4ND, U.K. (e-mail: aftab.khan@toshiba-bril.com).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TITS.2020.3046375
1558-0016 © 2020 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
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1
the volume of vehicles traveling on certain roads needs to be
ascertained using GPS data from their journeys quickly. Map
matching is also required in traverse time estimation [2], where
many trajectories need to be rapidly analysed and compared
to determine travel times. Due to the ever-increasing number
of vehicles on the road, the scale of this type of problem has
increased significantly, exacerbating the need to perform map
matching even more efficiently.
Moreover, map matching is also required due to the
inevitable measurement errors associated with GPS sensors.
These errors manifest in different forms such as the Urban
Canyon effect, where the presence of tall buildings in an
urban environment blocks a number of GPS satellites and
there are not enough available satellite signals to estimate the
positioning information of a fix [3]. Other errors may occur
due to multipath satellite signals that arrive at a receiver via
a non-direct path, such as being reflected off high buildings
in built-up city areas. Instead of resulting in a lack of fix,
these can lead to an inaccurate position being calculated. This
is potentially more challenging than simply obtaining no GPS
point, as it can lead to the map matching algorithm propagating
these errors during the route calculation. Additionally, the sam-
pling rate of the GPS data also has a significant impact towards
the accuracy of the map matching algorithms. Historically,
it has not been feasible to sample the GPS sensor regularly due
to energy and transmission-bandwidth limitations. However,
the inclusion of GPS sensors within vehicles and phones
with increasingly efficient bandwidth utilisation has allowed
GPS sampling at much higher sampling rates. This increased
volume of data is great for improving accuracy, although it
dramatically increases the computational cost of existing map
matching algorithms.
The widespread adoption and increasing popularity of these
systems has led to a large amount of research being conducted
in this area [4]–[8]. Although some approaches use techniques
such as Neural Networks and Fuzzy-Logic [7], the majority
of research has been based on the work by Newson [4] that
utilises a Hidden Markov Model combined with the Viterbi
algorithm.
To address the performance issues, an accelerated map
matching algorithm (AMM) is presented in this paper that
circumvents the bottlenecks of traditional approaches to map
matching whilst maintaining similarly high accuracy. The
proposed algorithm uses a weighted Hidden Markov Model
approach that depends upon spatially-aware heuristics to accel-
erate the determination of the traversed road segments. This
work builds upon the approach proposed in [4], by taking
advantage of instances when data availability is high in order
to eschew computationally intensive elements of the algorithm.
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2 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS
Fig. 1. Visualisation of the local, incremental, and global approaches to map
matching. The point in (a) is the centre point in (b). (c) represents the whole
journey.
In Section II, the three main approaches to map matching
are discussed. This is followed by an explanation of the opera-
tion of Newson’s map matching method, with a description of
the Viterbi algorithm that is used to estimate the most likely
path through the road network.
In Section III, the exact part of Newson’s algorithm that
results in the performance bottleneck is identified. This is
followed by the road-map processing stage which is required
to ascertain the topographical information used in the final
algorithm. Next, it is shown how the performance bottleneck in
the baseline approach can be overcome using this topographi-
cal information, whilst maintaining a similarly high accuracy.
Removing this performance bottleneck leads to a significant
decrease in the algorithm’s run-time, which forms the main
contribution of this paper. After this, a hybridisation technique
is outlined which describes how the proposed algorithm can
be seamlessly integrated with Newson’s [4] in an automated
way, to dynamically adapt to the availability of data. In order
to significantly improve performance when performing map
matching on larger road-maps, we also propose a process
called ‘Map Stitching’ in this section.
The rest of the paper is organised as follows. Section IV
outlines the two datasets used, and the experimental pro-
tocol. In Section V, results using the proposed method are
shown with comparisons against the baseline, followed by
an explanation of how these improvements are related to
the data sampling rate. Finally, conclusions are presented in
Section VI.
II. BACKGROUND
A. Approaches to Map Matching
There are three main approaches to performing map match-
ing that are reported in the literature: local, incremental, and
global. The local approach [9]–[11] simply maps each GPS
point to the closest point on the road network. As can be
observed when comparing Figures 1a and 1b, there are cases
when this approach leads to an incorrect mapping, particularly
when there is a GPS point with multiple roads nearby. There-
fore, although many map matching methods utilise the distance
from a GPS point to its nearest road, this only addresses one
part of the overall estimate. Local approaches are rarely used
in practice: although they can be very fast and efficient, they
are extremely vulnerable to measurement noise.
The incremental approach [12]–[15] is the most prevalent
and includes the algorithm proposed by Newson et al. [4]
and others that seek to optimise this approach [6], [8]. This
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approach makes predictions for a given point based on the
combination of the point’s own position and the position
of the point which precedes it. This means that topological
information and travel distance can both be taken into account.
The main advantage of using such an approach is in attaining a
relatively high accuracy whilst requiring much less processing
time and memory than the global approach (described next).
An example of this approach is proposed in [4] that provides
high accuracy using a GPS data set collected in Washing-
ton (also outlined in Section IV.A). This approach can be
improved further, particularly in improving run-time, which
forms the main contribution of this paper.
The global approach [16], [17] considers the entire jour-
ney, and utilises elements from the local and incremental
approaches in order to map the entire journey to a path along
the road network using some similarity measures. This avoids
the error propagation problem encountered with incremental
algorithms, when one mis-matched point leads to the next
being in error and so on. This also allows for novel approaches
such as supervised learning to be used which take individ-
ual driver preferences for certain routes into account [18].
Therefore, the highest accuracy can be achieved by utilising
a global method, although the trade-off in performance makes
the suitability of such an approach debatable. An interesting
example of this approach is the AntMapper algorithm [5],
which adopts an ant-colony-based optimisation approach that
mimics the transporting actions of ants in nature. This claims
accuracy improvements over Newson’s method which range
from 2.18% to 11.65% as the sampling rate decreases. It is
important to note that no testing was performed on sampling
rates above 0.1Hz, as higher sampling rates exponentially
increase processing time for the global approach to map
matching. The Ant-Mapper paper also claims dramatic per-
formance improvements over Newson’s HMM method [4],
reducing run-time by over 80%. However, the authors do not
include their pre-processing stage in the run-time calculation,
which if included would potentially increase the run-time
to even higher than Newson’s method. Therefore, although
the global approach can be seen to increase accuracy con-
siderably for lower sampling rates, this comes at a signifi-
cant expense in performance, especially as the sampling rate
increases.
Other extensions have also been proposed for Newson’s [4]
algorithm, such as by Goh et al. [19]. However, this suffers
from its own computational bottleneck, like [5], requiring
pre-processing in the form of training an SVM classifier prior
to the algorithm’s deployment.
This paper presents an adaptation of the incremental map
matching method of [4] with the aim to significantly improve
the run-time performance whilst maintaining the high accuracy
associated with it. Newson’s method, used as a benchmark
approach in this paper, employs a Hidden Markov Model
combined with the Viterbi algorithm to find the most likely
path. It will be shown that by taking into account the
topology of the road network, the calculations required to
perform the Viterbi algorithm can be significantly accelerated
in terms of run-time with very little change in the overall
accuracy.
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DOGRAMADZI AND KHAN: ACCELERATED MAP MATCHING FOR GPS TRAJECTORIES
TABLE I
N OTATION
B. Newson’s Method
The map matching method proposed by Newson takes a
set of GPS points as an input and then uses two metrics, mea-
surement probability and transition probability, to estimate the
most likely route through the road network. The relationship
between GPS points and road network positions is modelled
using the Hidden Markov Model, while the calculation of the
most likely route is performed by the Viterbi algorithm. Both
are detailed in the following section.
1) Hidden Markov Model: A Hidden Markov Model is a
type of Markov Chain, which is defined as “A stochastic
model describing a sequence of possible events in which the
probability of each event depends only on the state attained in
the previous event” [20]. This is related to the incremental map
matching approach, which considers the previous point when
matching the current one. A Hidden Markov Model, however,
has hidden states which are related (but not directly linked)
to observations. In other words, an observation provides infor-
mation about the state, but does not completely reveal which
state it comes from. The current state is also dependent on the
previous one, as can be observed in Figure 2.
Figure 2 shows the model used; the states represent the car’s
actual location on the road, and the observations are the raw
GPS points. The states are related because there is a direct link
between a car’s current location, and it’s previous location.
Each observation is related to its state, but because there is
noise in the measurement it is impossible to be certain about
exactly which state it has come from. This is why the states
are considered ‘hidden’. In the context of map matching, a
‘state’ is a candidate point on the road network. In other words,
a possible point which a raw GPS point may map to. A set
of candidate points is obtained by finding the closest point on
each road, within some threshold radius, to the GPS point. The
threshold radius accounts for noise in the GPS measurement.
For example, a GPS point on a motorway will have candidate
points on the road running in each direction, and it is up to
the map matching algorithm to decide which one is correct
(e.g. by observing where the previous point is).
2) Viterbi Algorithm: The next core element of Newson’s
paper is the use of the Viterbi algorithm. This is an efficient
way of finding the most likely sequence of hidden states,
or rather the most likely route along the road network.
It should be noted that it does not find a global optimum
but rather a local one. Finding a global optimum likelihood
would be computationally expensive, so the Viterbi algorithm
makes the Markov assumption: a state is dependent only on
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3
Fig. 2. Hidden Markov model represented by a Bayesian network diagram,
where: S=State, O=Observation.
the previous state. In practice, this returns a sequence which
is very close to the most likely one, but not guaranteed to be
the optimum. The Viterbi algorithm operates using two sets
of probabilities, which represent the likelihoods of individual
states and the transitions between them:
• Measurement Probability
• Transition Probability
The measurement probability is the likelihood of each
candidate point for a GPS point belonging to that point. For
example, a candidate point closer to the raw GPS point would
have a higher measurement probability than one that is further
away. This is intuitive as GPS error can be modelled as a
zero-mean Gaussian distribution [21], and so we should expect
the correct candidate to be close to the raw GPS point. This
can be written as follows:
1 De
M p = e− σ
σ
where σ is the standard deviation of GPS measurement noise.
The value of σ was calculated in Newson’s paper to be just
over 4 metres.
The transition probability is the probability that each candi-
date point for the current GPS point comes after each candidate
for the previous GPS point. For example, two candidates which
lie on the same section of road are more likely than two
candidates which lie on parallel roads, as it is very unlikely
that the car has jumped from one road to the other across two
sequential observations. This is calculated by assuming that the
Euclidean distance between two candidates should be similar
to the road-network distance between them, with Newson
confirming that this fits an exponential distribution with the
parameter β. To take the earlier example, the difference
between these distances when two candidates lie on the same
section of road is near zero, whereas if they are on parallel
roads then the routing distance would be much higher and
therefore the difference greater (and probability lower). The
transition probability T p can therefore be expressed as follows:
1 − Dβt
Tp = e
β
where Dt = |Dr − De |.
The Viterbi algorithm takes the series of hidden states
(candidate points), along with their associated measurement
or transition probabilities as input. The first matched point
is found simply as the candidate with the highest measure-
ment probability, as there are no transition probabilities for
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4 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS
Fig. 3. Segmentation of a road, where X a and X z represent its two end-
points, is performed by recursively halving it until the maximum segment
length is less than the threshold of 60m. The distance of 140m is used for
illustrative purposes only.
this base case. After this, the sets of candidates (for each
GPS point) are iterated through and the candidate with the
highest combination of measurement and transition probability
is selected, considering only the transitions to the previous
candidate points as per the Markov assumption.
III. ACCELERATED M AP M ATCHING
A. Accelerating Calculation of T p
The operation of Newson’s map matching algorithm should
now be clear, especially with regards to the calculation and
usage of the measurement and transition probabilities. To opti-
mise the algorithm, it is necessary to analyse which part is
causing a performance bottleneck, or in other words which
part is taking up a high proportion of the run-time.
The biggest bottleneck in Newson’s map matching algo-
rithm is the routing function used to find the road-network
distance from each of a GPS point’s candidates (Ci ) to each
of the candidates for the point which came before it (Ci−1 ).
The road-network distance is needed for the calculation of T p
between each pair of candidate points.
The proposed algorithm is able to circumvent the require-
ment of using the routing function by segmenting each road
on the road-map which the GPS points are being matched to.
Figure 3 shows how every road is split in half until its
segments are shorter than the maximum threshold length,
which in this case was chosen to be 60m. It should be noted
that this means that the minimum possible segment length
is 30m, as a segment just over 60m long will be halved.
It should also be noted that every segment is only part of
one road, and cannot stretch across multiple roads. The value
of 30m was chosen because a car travelling at 70mph would
travel approximately this distance in one second. Therefore,
at legal driving speeds, the commonly used 1Hz sampling rate
would almost always place subsequent GPS points on adjacent
segments.
This change in the topology of the roadmap led to the main
reasoning behind the Accelerated Map Matching algorithm:
using the adjacency of the sections in order to speed up
the transition-probability calculations.
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Algorithm 1 Accelerated Map Matching
1: procedure ROUTE D ISTANCE C ALCULATION
 For every candidate pair across sets
y
2: for (cix , ci−1 ) in (Ci , Ci−1 ) do
y
 Start/End coordinates of cix and ci−1 sections
3: (sx1 , sx2 ) ← segment of cix
y
4: (s y1 , s y2 ) ← segment of ci−1
5: if (sx1 , sx2 ) == (s y1 , s y2 ) then  Same Segment
6: route_distance ← De (c j , ck )
7: else if sx1 == s y2 then  Adjacent Segments
8: route_distance ← De (c j , ck ) + s
9: else if sx2 == s y1 then  Adjacent Segments
10: route_distance ← De (c j , ck ) + s
11: else  Non-Adjacent segments
12: route_distance ← De (c j , ck ) + l
For every GPS point from x 0 to x N , the transition probabil-
ity needs to be calculated for every possible pairing of points
from Ci to Ci−1 , which requires the road-network distance
be calculated between each such pairing. It should be noted
that this volume of routing calculations are the main reason
why Newson’s algorithm takes so long to run. The proposed
algorithm is based on the following method of simulating this
route-distance calculation:
Algorithm 1 provides a method for quickly obtaining a ‘sim-
ulation’ of the actual routing distance which combines the fast
Euclidean Distance function with the adjacency information of
the segments on which the candidate points lie. The intuition
behind this is that candidate points on the same segment will
have a very similar routing and Euclidean distance, as they are
close together. Adjacent segments will also have this property,
although the small penalty applied is useful for reasons to
be explained later. If the candidate points are not on the
same segment, nor adjacent segments, then the large penalty
serves to make this transition unlikely as it will artificially
increase the value of |Dr − De | and thus lower the transition
probability. This method completely obviates the need to
find the road-network distance, which is responsible for a
large speed improvement. However, this approach does have
limitations; if the sampling rate is too low then it is unlikely
that neighbouring points will fall on adjacent segments. This
causes the proposed algorithm to revert to Newson’s approach.
A high sampling rate ensures that the correct candidate point
for each GPS point almost always lies on the same or an
adjacent segment to the correct candidate for the previous
GPS point. This is what allows for the ‘acceleration’ in the
Accelerated Map Matching approach; having dense GPS data
removes the need for the routing function and speeds up the
calculation of the transition probabilities. The extent of this
improvement will be analysed in the Results section.
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DOGRAMADZI AND KHAN: ACCELERATED MAP MATCHING FOR GPS TRAJECTORIES
Fig. 4. Diagram showing where the proposed algorithm breaks down. Green circles are GPS points with arrows mapping to correct candidate point. Blue
lines represent a segmented road. L s is the maximum segment length.
B. Hybridisation & Error Correction
The Accelerated Map Matching method is able to accelerate
the transition probability calculation when neighbouring GPS
points are close together. However, when the points are not
close together, the correct candidate points for the current and
previous GPS points may no longer lie on the same or adjacent
segments. In this case, Accelerated Map Matching would apply
the ‘large penalty’ to the transition between the two correct
candidates, causing accuracy problems when determining the
most likely route. This is illustrated using the nodes connected
with a red arrow in Figure 4.
Therefore, it is required that the Accelerated Map Matching
algorithm have an automated way of detecting when it should
use the accelerated approach to route-distance calculation,
and when it should fall back to Newson’s approach which
uses the actual routing distance. Figure 4 shows that the
distance between sequential GPS points is similar to the
distance between their correct candidate points. Therefore, the
accelerated approach is run only when the distance between
two sequential GPS points is less than the minimum segment
length. This ensures that the accelerated approach is only
run when the correct candidates are on the same or adjacent
segments, which maintains the accuracy of the road-network
distance calculation.
This represents a hybridised approach to calculating the
route distance, which dynamically adapts itself to the avail-
ability of GPS data. If the GPS data for a journey is sparse,
Newson’s approach is used. If the journey has certain stretches
with dense GPS data, then the acceleration is run for these
parts. This allows for a large reduction in run-time to be
achievable with almost no change in accuracy.
There are certain situations where the accelerated approach
causes small matching errors. For example, this may occur
when the journey involves making a turn but the GPS points
do not track the turn very precisely, such as in Figure 5. This
occurs because at an intersection, the candidate points on all
roads leading out of the intersection are on an adjacent section
to the previous correct candidate. Therefore, the algorithm
simply chooses whichever candidate is closest to the GPS
point. However, when the GPS point overshoots the turn, the
closest candidate is on the wrong road, causing the error as
shown in Figure 5. This is corrected by applying a small
penalty (equal to the segment length) whenever an adjacent
segment is transitioned to, i.e., whenever the current candidate
point is on an adjacent segment to the previous candidate point.
This has the effect of penalising multiple transitions over the
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5
Fig. 5. Diagram showing overshoot; left figure shows the incorrect placement
of matched points due to the raw GPS points overshooting the turn. Right
figure illustrates how a small penalty can fix this. Orange dots are raw GPS
points and blue dots are matched points.
same node, which in this case is the intersection. The image
on the right of Figure 5 shows how this achieves the correct
matching of points.
C. Map Stitching
The main performance bottleneck identified in Newson’s
algorithm was the routing function used to calculate route
distance between the candidate points. Once this bottleneck
was removed with the Accelerated Map Matching algorithm,
a new one became apparent, especially with large/complex
road-maps. This new bottleneck occurred during the process
of identifying candidate points on the road network; for every
GPS point it is necessary to check every segment in the
roadmap to see whether it is close enough to map a candidate
point onto.
Figure 6 provides a visualisation of this: to check if a
segment is within the orange circle where candidate points are
mapped onto road segments, it is required to run a distance
calculation to every segment in the entire roadmap. If there
are many GPS points composing a journey, then the roadmap
which encloses them will be very large, and a large amount
of distance calculations will be required, especially as this
distance check needs to be performed for every single GPS
point.
Map-stitching is the process of breaking up the sequence
of GPS points into smaller groups, fetching the roadmap
enclosing only the group currently being matched, and then
performing the map matching algorithm as usual on each
group. The matched points returned from each group are then
appended into a list which contains the matched points for the
entire journey.
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6 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS
Fig. 6. Left shows journey from Washington data. Right shows a single
GPS point and the area around it within which candidate points are mapped
to segments.
Fig. 7. Visualisation of the map-stitching method, with the roadmaps being
mapped to shown using blue boxes.
Figure 7 illustrates the way in which map-stitching operates.
Every blue box contains a sub-set of GPS points which
compose the journey, and the box itself represents the roadmap
which the sub-set is being matched to. It can be seen that the
areas of the roadmap which are not contained within a blue
box are no longer in consideration as potential roads which
may have a candidate point on them. Therefore, the distance
to them no longer needs to be calculated, which dramatically
reduces the run-time of the algorithm; this is shown in the
next section, within Table V.
The reason why the blue boxes in Figure 7 overlap slightly
is because it is necessary to append the last point of each
group to the start of the next one. This allows for the transition
probability calculation to be performed, and the accuracy of
the overall algorithm to remain exactly the same as it would
be without map-stitching.
IV. E XPERIMENTS
A. ParkUs Dataset
ParkUs is a smart parking application [22], [23] providing
parking availability information to users in order to reduce
parking search times. In this work we use an extension of the
ParkUs dataset, which contains GPS data from 117 journeys
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TABLE II
PARK U S D ATASET S UMMARY
TABLE III
WASHINGTON D ATASET S UMMARY
conducted across a trial of the ParkUs mobile application1 (see
Table II). The ParkUs application collects each user’s trip data.
Then, parking information using a ‘cruising’ (searching for
parking) detection algorithm [22], [23] is computed. The app
requires data from a large number of trips which are processed
simultaneously. The app suffers from prohibitive delays in map
matching these many trips which results in providing parking
information that may be stale by the time all the computations
are completed and presented to the users. The collected dataset
contains trip data only in the last 400m of each journey,
resulting in a large number of relatively short journeys. The
GPS data was sampled at 1Hz; the maximum allowed by
the Android operating system. The approach presented in this
paper solves this problem, with results detailed in the next
section.
B. Washington Dataset
The Washington Dataset was first presented by
Newson et al. [4], and is one of the most widely utilised
benchmark data sets for testing map matching algorithms.
It contains GPS data from a drive around Seattle, WA, USA
using SiRF Star III GPS chipset with WAAS (Wide Area
Augmentation System) enabled. The journey was sampled
at 1Hz and contains just over two hours of driving in both
challenging inner city environments and the outer suburbs.
The total route was 80km long with 7531 data samples
containing latitude and longitude pairs. Table III shows an
overview of this dataset. Further details regarding the dataset
can be found in [4].
V. R ESULTS
A. ParkUs Dataset Results
Table IV shows the average run-time of the map matching
algorithms across both trials. We used an Intel i5-4670 CPU
@ 3.4GHz with 8GB of DDR3 RAM to perform the run-time
analysis. It can be seen that the proposed approach offers
a run-time reduction of over 95% using this data set. This
demonstrates the algorithm’s ability to bring the execution time
down from a matter of minutes to a few seconds. Furthermore,
1 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=toshiba.parkus
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DOGRAMADZI AND KHAN: ACCELERATED MAP MATCHING FOR GPS TRAJECTORIES
TABLE IV
AVERAGE RUN -T IME OF N EWSON ’ S M ETHOD AND P ROPOSED M ETHOD
FOR PARK U S D ATA S ET W ITHOUT M AP -S TITCHING
Fig. 8. Proposed method vs Newson’s method: GPS sampling rate vs
algorithm run-time for Washington data set.
this has been made possible without creating a large table of
pre-computed distances as in [6], which keeps the memory
usage of the algorithm minimal.
B. Washington Dataset Results
Table V shows the run-time analysis of map matching for
both algorithms, as well as the reductions offered by using the
map-stitching approach from the previous section. The same
computing platform as described above is used to perform this
analysis. Without map-stitching, it is evident that the run-time
of the accelerated approach offers a much smaller percentage
improvement as shown in Table V. This is due to the size of
the roadmap being matched to; every GPS point checks every
single section to see if it is close enough to place a candidate
point on. This new bottleneck means that even though the
accelerated approach is faster, the magnitude of improvement
is much lower.
This is why the map-stitching approach was developed; seg-
menting the GPS points and mapping only parts of the journey
at a time means that the map being matched to becomes much
smaller, without making any difference to the accuracy. This
eliminates a large part of this new bottleneck, and makes the
matching of a large number of points much more efficient,
as can be observed in the percentage reductions along the
bottom of Table V. The combination of map-stitching and the
accelerated algorithm reduces the run-time of map matching
on the Washington data set from 1974.87 seconds to 49.4
seconds, a percentage reduction of 97.5%.
When both methods use map-stitching the run-time of the
proposed algorithm is reduced by 58.21%, which is a smaller
run-time reduction than the one achieved for the ParkUs
data set. The reason for this is the size of the road-map
being matched to; even with map-stitching, the road-map is
much larger in the Washington data set. As described in
Section III(C), this increases the overhead caused by checking
which road segments the algorithm should consider a candi-
date point for. The performance of the proposed algorithm is
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7
TABLE V
RUN -T IME OF N EWON ’ S M ETHOD AND P ROPOSED M ETHOD FOR
WASHINGTON D ATA S ET
Fig. 9. Proposed method vs Newson’s method: GPS sampling rate vs
accuracy (% of points matched to correct road segment) for Washington data
set.
therefore dependent on the size of the road-map. The 95%
run-time reduction observed with the ParkUs data set can be
achieved only if the road-map size isn’t too large. This can
be performed using the map-stitching method, as detailed in
Section III (C).
C. Sampling Rates
Figure 8 shows how the performance of Newson’s and the
Proposed methods vary with the sampling rate of the GPS
data. Newson’s method speeds up as the sampling rate is
reduced. This is due to there being fewer points to match
which leads to direct run-time improvements, although there
is an accuracy penalty to this which will be discussed later.
The proposed method takes slightly longer when the rate is
dropped from 1Hz to 0.5Hz. This is because it begins to
use Newson’s routing-calculation approach more frequently
due to a greater number of GPS points being further apart
than the segment length. As the sampling rate drops further,
the run-time eventually converges as Newson’s method is
used for the majority of route calculations. In summary, the
proposed method will always be at least as fast as Newson’s,
but the degree of improvement will always be dependent on
the sampling rate of the data.
Figure 9 illustrates the accuracy drop as the sampling rate
is decreased. The term ‘accuracy’ in this context refers to the
percentage of GPS points which have been matched to the
correct segment of the road network.
The accuracy drop when the sampling rate is lowered is due
to the previous GPS point providing less information about the
current one, due to it being further away. However, the drop
between 1Hz and 0.5Hz is minimal. Comparing the results of
Figure 8 and 9, it can be deduced that a 0.5Hz sampling rate
provides the best trade off between accuracy and run-time for
both approaches.
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8 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS

Fig. 10. Proposed method (left) showing correct matching at the parallel roads compared against Newson’s method (right). Orange represents the ground
truth and blue is the estimated match.

Fig. 11. Proposed method (left) showing incorrect matching at the roundabout compared against Newson’s method (right). Orange and blue represent the
ground truth and estimated matches respectively.

Further analysing the results, in Figure 10, we compare
the performance of the proposed method against Newson’s
approach [4]. It can be seen that the proposed method matches
the GPS points to the road network more accurately than
Newson’s method in this scenario. This is due to Newson’s
method propagating an error that was made on one match.
Such errors are inherently avoided in the proposed method
due to the penalisation of multiple transitions over the same
intersection as demonstrated in Figure 5. In Figure 11, it can
be seen that the proposed method does not achieve the
same accuracy as Newson’s in this scenario. This is due to
difficulties stemming from the segmentation of the round-
about ‘road’, which leads to the algorithm not performing as
expected.
VI. C ONCLUSION AND F UTURE W ORK
In this paper, a new method for map matching was proposed
for efficiently mapping GPS trajectories onto a road network.
This was achieved by leveraging the higher sampling rate
required by majority of novel application (including our test
dataset) to accelerate the routing-distance calculations. These
calculations were a known source of computational bottle-
neck to the previous algorithms’ performance. We extensively
evaluated the proposed approach and, combined with the
map-stitching method, demonstrated the reduction in the total
run-time of the open source Washington data to be approxi-
mately one-sixth of the time taken by our baseline algorithm.
We also showed that the proposed algorithm provides an

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DOGRAMADZI AND KHAN: ACCELERATED MAP MATCHING FOR GPS TRAJECTORIES
average run-time reduction of 95.40% using our smart parking
dataset (ParkUs), whilst maintaining a similar level of accuracy
compared against the baseline.
The performance of the proposed and benchmark
map-matching methods rely on two factors that we identified
in this paper including, a) road map size i.e., if the road map
size (or road-map density) is large, there is a performance
degradation in run-time, and b) GPS sampling rate, where
lower rates slightly reduce the map-matching accuracy. For
the former we proposed a map-stitching approach in which we
divide the journey into shorter sets of GPS points. We then use
these shorter subsections of the road-map for map-matching
that improves the computational time by 97% on a widely
used benchmark dataset that has over 2 hours of data for
a single journey. For sampling rates, based on our evalu-
ation, less than 1% performance degradation was observed
for 0.1Hz when compared against 1Hz. We believe, although
nearly all mobile devices support GPS sampling rates of over
1Hz, lower sampling rates under 0.1Hz might cause further
performance degradation and therefore is not recommended
for map-matching.
In this paper, we assumed a Gaussian distribution for GPS
errors [21]. As a future research study, other –more realistic–
error distributions may be considered that are more applicable
for modeling GPS errors. This may help in more adverse
conditions where GPS errors are significantly severe (e.g., due
to tall buildings or loss of signal). Such errors may also be
handled by using other forms of sensing information such as
using dead reckoning [24], and using the estimated position as
an input for our map matching algorithm. Other methods such
as [25] may also be used in conjunction with the proposed
method for further optimisation based on the most optimal
sampling rate for a given set of points. Moreover, we also
observed that segmentation of roads in specific scenarios
such as when traversing a roundabout leads to incorrectly
matched GPS points. This may be resolved by handling
segmentation of roundabouts either via reducing the segment
lengths or dynamically handling this based on the vehicle
speed.
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10
Marko Dogramadzi is currently a Graduate
Engineer at Siemens plc., having joined after fin-
ishing a degree in computer science with elec-
tronics, while being sponsored by Siemens through
the E3 Academy. His third-year industrial project
was related to the development of a scalable smart
parking system (ParkUs), which involved in creating
a high-performance map-matching algorithm (pre-
sented in this paper). This method has also been
patented with Toshiba. His fourth-year project was
related to the creation of a voice-controlled infra-red
remote-control, with the goal of creating a home-automation system which can
function without Internet connectivity. His work at his current employment
in Siemens has been oriented around industrial-cloud technology, web-app
development, and project management.
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS
Aftab Khan (Member, IEEE) received the B.Eng.
(Hons.) degree in electronic engineering and the
Ph.D. degree in machine learning from the Univer-
sity of Surrey, in 2008 and 2013, respectively. He is
currently a Principal Research Engineer with the
Bristol Research and Innovation Laboratory, Toshiba
Europe Limited, U.K. Prior to joining Toshiba in
2015, he worked as a Post-Doctoral Research Asso-
ciate at Newcastle University, U.K. During his Ph.D.,
he developed methods for hierarchical analysis of
time series data as a part of the EPSRC Project
(ACASVA). These concepts he developed further, which led to one of the
first papers on automated and generalized skill assessment from body-worn
sensor data for which he (and his coauthors) received the Honorable Mention
Award at the 2015 ACM Ubicomp Conference (developed under the EPSRC
SiDE Project). As a part of the EU H2020 REPLICATE Project, he and his
coauthors developed one of the first methods for automatically detecting the
behavior of searching for parking using mobile crowdsensing with the aim
of providing real-time parking information within a smart city. His research
agenda is mainly focused on machine learning, artificial intelligence, and
pattern recognition with a particular interest in human behavior analysis
through automated activity recognition and the IoT sensing.