Geographical Analysis, 2010 (In press)

D. Orellana and M. Wachowicz

“[This is a working version of a paper accepted for publication in  Geographical Analysis. For the final version, please contact the author.]

“One  of the main tasks  in analysing pedestrian movement is to detect  places where pedestrians stop,  because those  places  are usually associated to specific human activities and  they  can  allow us to understand their movement behaviour. Very few approaches have been proposed to detect the locations of stops in positioning data sets, and they are usually based on selecting the location of candidate stops  as well as  potential  spatial and temporal thresholds according to  different application  requirements. However, these approaches are not suitable  for analysing the slow movement of pedestrians where the inaccuracy of  non-differential GPS  commonly used for movement tracking  is  so  significant  that can hinder the selection of  adequate  thresholds.  In this  paper,  we  propose  an  exploratory statistical approach in order to detect patterns of movement suspension using a local index of spatial association (LISA)  in a vector space representation. Two different positioning data sets  are used  to evaluate our approach  in terms of exploring movement suspension patterns which  can be  related to  different landscapes. They are  players  of  an urban  outdoor mobile game and visitors  of  a  natural  park. The results show that  in both experiments patterns of movement suspension were located at places such as checkpoints  in  the game and different attractions and facilities  in  the park. Based on these results we conclude that LISA  is a reliable approach for exploring movement suspension  patterns  that  represent  the places where  the movement of  pedestrians is temporally suspended by physical restrictions (e.g. checkpoints of the mobile game and the route choosing points of the park). ”

• Read the working draft paper [PDF]