A method for summarizing and visualizing city traffic data

This paper proposes a method for summarizing and visualizing city traffic data covering multiple different-sized urban areas. City traffic data is often visualized in various areas in order to understand the state of city traffic. For example, bus transportation is visualized in a large area, and strolling people are visualized in a small area. A problem is that visualization covering a large area needs a heavy computation load because of the immense amount of data of city traffic. The city traffic data covering a large area includes needless details to visualize. To reduce the volume of data, we therefore propose a method for summarizing city traffic data. City traffic data consists of two kinds of data: transportation data of different transportation means, and road network data of different kinds of road. The method for summarizing road network data deletes low-volume road information while the method for summarizing transportation data calculates traffic statistics. To examine whether the proposed summarization method can reduce the volume of city traffic data, we conducted experiments using city traffic data imitating bus passengers walking.