Extracting Flooded Roads by Fusing GPS Trajectories and Road Network

• Main Authors: Shiying She, Haoyu Zhong, Zhixiang Fang, Meng Zheng, Yan Zhou
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2019-09-01
• Series: ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information
• Subjects: flooded road extraction; GPS trajectory points; multi-source data fusion; vector road network
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2220-9964/8/9/407

Urban roads are the lifeline of urban transportation and satisfy the commuting and travel needs of citizens. Following the acceleration of urbanization and the frequent extreme weather in recent years, urban waterlogging is occurring more than usual in summer and has negative effects on the urban traffic networks. Extracting flooded roads is a critical procedure for improving the resistance ability of roads after urban waterlogging occurs. This paper proposes a flooded road extraction method to extract the flooding degree and the time at which roads become flooded in large urban areas by using global positioning system (GPS) trajectory points with driving status information and the high position accuracy of vector road data with semantic information. This method uses partition statistics to create density grids (grid layer) and uses map matching to construct a time-series of GPS trajectory point density for each road (vector layer). Finally, the fusion of grids and vector layers obtains a more accurate result. The experiment uses a dataset of GPS trajectory points and vector road data in the Wuchang district, which proves that the extraction result has a high similarity with respect to the flooded roads reported in the news. Additionally, extracted flooded roads that were not reported in the news were also found. Compared with the traditional methods for extracting flooded roads and areas, such as rainfall simulation and SAR image-based classification in urban areas, the proposed method discovers hidden flooding information from geospatial big data, uploaded at no cost by urban taxis and remaining stable for a long period of time.