Inferring human activities from GPS tracks

Abstract

The collection of huge amount of tracking data made possible by the widespread use of GPS devices, enabled the analysis of such data for several applications domains, ranging from traffic management to advertisement and social studies. However, the raw positioning data, as it is detected by GPS devices, lacks of semantic information since this data does not natively provide any additional contextual information like the places that people visited or the activities performed. Traditionally, this information is collected by hand filled questionnaire where a limited number of users are asked to annotate their tracks with the activities they have done. With the purpose of getting large amount of semantically rich trajectories, we propose an algorithm for automatically annotating raw trajectories with the activities performed by the users. To do this, we analyse the stops points trying to infer the Point Of Interest (POI) the user has visited. Based on the category of the POI and a probability measure based on the gravity law, we infer the activity performed. We experimented and evaluated the method in a real case study of car trajectories, manually annotated by users with their activities. Experimental results are encouraging and will drive our future works.