Trajectory Box Plot: a new pattern to summarize movements

International audienceNowadays, an abundance of sensors are used to collect very large datasets of moving objects. The movement of these objects can be analysed by identifying common routes. For this, a cluster of trajectories must be defined and the pattern of each cluster discovered. In this article, we introduce a new pattern, called the Trajectory Box Plot (TBP), to summarize a set of trajectories following the same route. The TBP is an extension of the well-known descriptive statistics Box Plot concept. Each TBP is described by a median trajectory, a 3D box and a 3D fence. The median trajectory depicts the typical movement of mobile objects. The box and the fences (whiskers) describe the spatial and temporal spreading around the central tendency. TBPs are useful to summarize and analyse trajectory streams, understand their spatio-temporal density and detect outliers. In this article, visual analysis highlights how the TBP pattern effectively describes how the density of trajectory clusters change over time