Tell me more ×
Geographic Information Systems Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for cartographers, geographers and GIS professionals. It's 100% free, no registration required.

Sports tracker applications usually record a timestamp and a location in regular intervals in order to store the entire track. Analytical applications then allow to find certain statistics, such as the track subsection with the highest speed of a fixed duration (e.g. time needed for 5 miles). Or vice versa, the longest distance traversed in certain time span (e.g. Cooper distance in 12 minutes).

I'm wondering what's the most elegant and/or efficient approach to compute such sections.

In a naive approach, I'd normalize and interpolate the waypoints to get a more fine grained list of waypoints, either with a fixed time interval or fix distance steps. Then, move a sliding window representing my time span resp. distance segement over the list and search for the best sub-list matching my criteria. Is there any better way?

share|improve this question
The sliding window can be very fast, given its simplicity. This might be the best solution when interpolating the waypoints in any nonlinear fashion: the timing will be dominated by the calculation of the interpolator (such as a spline). This raises the question of how accurate you need the calculations to be. – whuber Dec 4 '12 at 8:25

Know someone who can answer? Share a link to this question via email, Google+, Twitter, or Facebook.

Your Answer

 
discard

By posting your answer, you agree to the privacy policy and terms of service.

Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.