A survey of trajectory distance measures and performance evaluation

The proliferation of trajectory data in various application domains has inspired tremendous research efforts to analyze large-scale trajectory data from a variety of aspects. A fundamental ingredient of these trajectory analysis tasks and applications is distance measures for effectively determining how similar two trajectories are. We conduct a comprehensive survey of the trajectory distance measures. The trajectory distance measures are classified into four categories according to the trajectory data type and whether the temporal information is measured. In addition, the effectiveness and complexity of each distance measure are studied. The experimental study is also conducted on their effectiveness in the six different trajectory transformations.