Map matching: comparison of approaches using sparse and noisy data

The process of map matching takes a sequence of possibly noisy GPS coordinates from a vehicle trace and estimates the actual road positions---a crucial first step needed by many GPS applications. There has been a plethora of methods for map matching published, but most of them are evaluated on low-noise datasets obtained from a planned route. And comparisons with other methods are very limited. Based on our previous unifying framework used to catalog different mathematical formulas in many published methods, we evaluate representative algorithms using the low-noise dataset from the GIS Cup 2012 and a high-noise dataset collected from Shanghai downtown. Our experiments reveal that global max-weight and global geometrical map matching methods are the most accurate, but each has its weaknesses. We therefore propose a new map matching algorithm that integrates Fréchet distance with global weight optimization, which is more accurate across all sampling intervals.