A pedestrian network construction algorithm based on multiple GPS traces

Currently, pedestrian networks are not as widely available as road networks are for many areas; this is partly due to the high demand for applications such as car navigation. However, this situation is rapidly changing as GPS‐enabled mobile devices are increasingly becoming commonplace for pedestrian applications and as they are potential for volunteered data collection. For this reason, the development of efficient and cost‐effective techniques appropriate for collecting and constructing pedestrian network databases is needed. This paper presents an algorithm for automatically identifying geometries of pedestrian path segments and constructing a pedestrian network from multiple GPS traces. The algorithm was experimented by using two sets of data sources, self‐collected walking traces and OpenStreetMap (OSM) walking traces. The experiment with self‐collected data was validated by comparing the constructed pedestrian network with a network baseline and calculating the quality measurements in three environment settings. The experiment with OSM traces was validated by visually inspecting maps overlaid on high‐resolution images. Evaluation results show that the algorithm can automatically construct pedestrian networks.