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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS
CLRIC: Collecting Lane-Based Road
Information Via Crowdsourcing
Luliang Tang, Xue Yang, Zhen Dong, and Qingquan Li
AbstractLane-based road network information, such as the
number and locations of traffic lanes on a road, has played an
important role in intelligent transportation systems. In this pa-
per, we propose a Collecting Lane-based Road Information via
Crowdsourcing (CLRIC) method, which can automatically extract
detailed lane structure of roads by using crowdsourcing data
collected by vehicles. First, CLRIC filters the high-precision GPS
data from the raw trajectories based on region growing clustering
with prior knowledge. Second, CLRIC mines the number and
locations of traffic lanes through optimized constrained Gaussian
mixture model. Experiments are conducted with taxi GPS tra-
jectories in Wuhan, China, and the results show that CLRIC is
quantified and displays detailed road networks with the number
and locations of traffic lanes comparing with the satellite image
and human-interpreted situation.
Index TermsLane-based road information, crowdsourcing
data, high-precision GPS data filtering, spatiotemporal GPS
trajectories.
I. I NTRODUCTION
A CCURATE lane-based road network data (the number
and locations of traffic lanes) is crucial for ensuring reli-
able and safe driving for next generation navigation, especially
for intelligent transportation systems (ITS) such as advanced
driver assistance systems and autonomous driving. At the same
time, the number of lanes can also be important for infer-
ring the type of road and for estimating traffic flow capacity.
At present, lane-based information such as the number, turn
rules and locations of traffic lanes, is usually acquired from
high-definition video/images, laser point clouds, or DGPS/INS
trajectories(Differential GPS/Inertial Navigation System) with
accuracies of about 0.54 m [1][4]. Manual and semi-manual
are time-consuming and labor-intensive [5].
Crowdsourcing is a low-cost and efficient way to extract
useful information from data acquired by crowd participants or
volunteers. The crowdsourcing method has been successfully
Manuscript received June 7, 2015; revised November 1, 2015 and
January 10, 2016; accepted January 19, 2016. This work was supported by
the National Science Foundation of China under Grants 41571430, 41271442,
and 40801155. The Associate Editor for this paper was Z.-H. Mao.
L. Tang, X. Yang, and Z. Dong are with the State Key Laboratory of
Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan
University, Wuhan 430079, China (e-mail: yangxue@whu.edu.cn).
Q. Li is with the Department of Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Spatial Smart
Sensing and Services, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, China.
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TITS.2016.2521482
1524-9050 2016 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
1
applied in the Open Street Map (OSM) for road-level map
construction, which uses the Global Positioning System (GPS)
for localization [6][9]. But low-end GPS data devices and
urban canyons with tall buildings reduce the position accuracy
of GPS data to about 1015 m in urban areas. So it is a
challenging to extract lane-based road information from low
precision crowdsourcing GPS data.
In this paper, we propose CLRIC: collecting lane-level road
network information via crowdsourcing. CLRIC can automat-
ically extract the detailed lane structure of roads using crowd-
sourcing GPS data collected by vehicles. CLRIC is based on
two key observations. The first observation is that high preci-
sion GPS trajectories with accuracies of about 3 m still exist in
raw vehicle trajectories based on GPS error analysis [10]. Thus,
region growing clustering with prior knowledge (RGCPK) in
CLRIC system is used to select high-precision GPS data from
low precision raw GPS data. The second observation is that
vehicle trajectories contain abundant information regarding
road networks [11][13], traffic conditions [14], [15], points
of interest, and driving behaviors [16], [17], etc. The detailed
lane structure of roads can also be mined by using clustering
methods based on the assumption that GPS trajectories will
trend to cluster near the center of each lane with some spread.
Thus, CLRIC fits an optimized constrained Gaussian mixture
model to perpendicular cross sections of the trajectory vectors
across a road, and further determine the exact number and
locations of traffic lanes. In summary, the contributions of this
paper are the following.
1) We presented a trajectory optimization method to select
high-precision data from crowdsourcing GPS data. The
position accuracy of selected data is about 3 m.
2) We designed a mining lane information model based on
optimized constrained Gaussian mixture method.
The remainder of this article is organized as follows. In
Section II, related studies on trajectory optimization and traffic
lane information extraction from GPS trajectories are reviewed.
In Section III, CLRIC is fully described. In Section IV, a series
of experiments on Wuhan datasets are used to demonstrate the
advantages and effectiveness of the CLRIC. In Section V, some
conclusions and directions for future research are given.
II. R ELATED W ORK
GPS does not work perfectly in urban area. When using GPS
receivers in street canyons with tall buildings, the shadowing
and multi-path effects results in low positional accuracy. Be-
sides, gathering GPS data via crowdsourcing way is relatively
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2 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS
Fig. 1. CLRIC architecture.
optional compared with professional way, so the raw GPS data
mixes with many outliers. At present, there are several ways
to optimize raw trajectories such as filtering, map matching,
and clustering algorithm. Filtering is suitable in those situations
where the high-sampling rate trajectory data is particularly
noisy, or when it is necessary to derive other quantities like
speed or direction from trajectory data [18]. Map matching
is another way for raw trajectory data optimization that each
trajectory is matched to road centerline it corresponds [19].
In addition, some researchers proposed that using clustering
method to remove outliers. In reference [14], authors used
Kernel density method to identify outliers and remove them.
The authors of [4] sort all the data points in ascending order ac-
cording to their distances from the median and then choose 95%
of the sorted data points as the experimental data. However, all
these methods [4], [14], [18], [19] have their defects. Filtering
is sensitive to the sampling rate of GPS data so its unfortunate
for GPS data with low-sampling rate. Map-matching is valid for
road-level information extraction like road network updating
and traffic flow detection and so on, but it is useless for lane-
based road information extraction because each GPS point is
matched to road centerline. Besides, the existing clustering
methods [4], [14] are confined to parameter setting and cant
remove outliers which are mixed in high-density points cluster.
Extracting information form pre-processed GPS data is the
key issue in geographic area. In this study, we focus on the lane-
based information extraction from GPS data. There has also
been work on completely automated methods aimed at inferring
road maps from crowdsourcing data. Those methods include
matching GPS traces to prototypical shapes [20], and using an
incremental method to process GPS traces that can be used to
generate road maps [21], [22], and applying clustering methods
or artificial algorithms to extract road network from GPS traces
[23][25]. Besides, OpenStreetMap uses user-contributed GPS
trajectories to create free digital maps that are open for editing
from registered users. Likewise, WikiMapia, Google Maps, and
other map applications let users to update maps. The methods
proposed in [20][25] can generate and update road-level maps
from crowdsourcing data, while detailed road network gener-
ation has gradually shifted down to lane-based road network
information such as the number and locations of traffic lanes.
Lane-based information extraction from vehicle trajectories
starts with differential GPS data and concludes with a refine-
ment of an existing map, including finding lanes and lane transi-
tions through the intersections [26], [27]. This process involves
smoothing and filtering the GPS data, matching it to an existing
map, spline fitting for the road centerlines, clustering to find
lanes, and refinement of the intersection geometry [28]. The
authors of [29] proposed to use vehicle trajectories collected by
mobile phones equipped with GPS and MEMS (Micro-Electro-
Mechanical System) to generate lane-level road maps in open
area. The lane-level information was extracted by statistically
analyzing the probability density distribution of trajectories
based on non-parametric Kernel Density Estimation. However,
the methods discussed in [26][29] are based on the assumption
that GPS trajectories from different lanes are separated well.
For low-precision crowdsourcing GPS data, this assumption is
seriously violated, and therefore we propose CLRIC to extract
lane structure from a mass of low-precision crowdsourcing GPS
data in urban area.
III. C OLLECTING L ANE -BASED ROAD
I NFORMATION VIA C ROWDSOURCING
The overview of the CLRIC system is shown in Fig. 1.
As seen in Fig. 1, CLRIC includes two steps:
Step 1) select high-precision data from crowdsourcing data
based on region growing clustering with prior knowl-
edge (RGCPK). The positional accuracy for selected
data can approach 3 m.
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TANG et al.: CLRIC: COLLECTING LANE-BASED ROAD INFORMATION VIA CROWDSOURCING
Fig. 2. Trajectories and trajectory vectors. (a) and (b) show the trajectory and
trajectory vector respectively, where N indicates the north and is the angle
with north of vector v 1i .
Step 2) extract and optimize lane-based information from se-
lected high-precision data such as the number and lo-
cations of traffic lanes using an optimized constrained
Gaussian mixture model and road construction rules.
A. Crowdsourcing Data: GPS Trajectories
In the real world, the trajectory of a moving object is
continuous and usually called the original route. However,
it is hard to acquire continuous trajectories through existing
positioning techniques or store them in a database. Thus an
alternative feasible solution taken in GPS-enabled services is to
store only a set of sampled positions of a trajectory, as a tuple
T racei = p1 , p2 . . . pn , pi is a GPS sampled spatial-temporal
point, which is a tuple xi , yi , ti , si (i = 1, 2, . . . n), as shown
in Fig. 2(a).
Here ti is the time stamp when data is collected, xi , yi 
is the geographic location of the moving object, si contains
some extra features of a moving object such as the vehicle
number, driving direction and speed. These kind of sampled
trajectories are called raw GPS trajectories. For a trajectory
vector vi = pi , pi+1 , pi and pi+1 are regarded as the start
point and the end point respectively, and the direction from pi
to pi+1 is regarded as the vector direction of vi (Fig. 2(b)).
For lane-based information extraction, the information of
traces such as location, driving direction and collected time are
very important. However, due to the errors caused by data sam-
pling and encryption in GPS navigation services, many GPS
records are not precise and thus generally need to be optimized.
B. RGCPK: Region Growing Clustering With
Prior Knowledge
Most drivers keep driving along the centerline of lanes and
change lanes in a short time. The GPS trajectory reflects the
tendency of vehicle. Thus, the high-precision data has two
features: tracking points with high positional accuracy always
cluster together along the centerline of each lane; the angle of
two adjacent trajectory vectors of a trajectory will not change
a lot unless they are at an intersection or changing lanes [30].
Based on this observation, RGCPK clusters trajectories based
on their similarity and then selects high-precision data from
clusters. The prior knowledge for RGCPK is extracted from
the similarity between high precision DGPS trajectories and
synchronized low precision GPS trajectories. The positioning
accuracy of a DGPS trajectory and its synchronized GPS
trajectory are about 0.5 m and 1015 m respectively, their
sampling rate is 1 s. To evaluate the similarity between DGPS
trajectory vector and its synchronized GPS trajectory vector, a
novel vector similarity evaluation model (VSEM) is presented.
3
Fig. 3. The similarity evaluation of trajectory vectors.
1) The Similarity Evaluation Model of Trajectory Vectors:
The difference of two trajectory vectors is reflected in the
vector direction and vertical distance between two start points
of vectors. As shown in Fig. 3, v i (xi , yi ), (xi+1 , yi+1 ) and
v j (xj , yj ), (xj+1 , yj+1 ) are two different trajectory vectors.
The angle to the north of v i and v j are 1 and 2 respectively.
The magnitude information of vectors is not discussed here
because we only care about the location accuracy of trajectories
rather than the sampling rate and speed of moving objects that
decide the value of magnitude of vectors.
Thus, the similarity measure in this paper is defined in the
form of linear weighting:
sim(vi ,vj ) = 1 edif fHd + 2 edif fij (1)
where dif fHd and dif fij represent the vertical difference and
angular difference of v i and v j respectively, 1 and 2 are the
weighting of the difference of vertical distance and angle, 1 +
2 = 1. In general similarity of two vectors ranges from 0 to 1,
with a value of 1 for two completely same vectors and a value
of 0 for two completely separated vectors. We define dif fHd
and dif fij as follows,
max(Hdij , Hdji )
dif fHd = (2)
Disconne
dif fij = 1 cos() (3)
where Disconne is the constant and decided by the width of
lane, and used to constrain the similarity of vectors on the same
lane as GPS traces trend to cluster near the center of each lane,
Hdij is the vertical distance from the v i starting point to the v j
starting point. The computation of Hdji is the same as Hdij ,
is the angular difference of v i and v j (Fig. 3), and can be
estimated as:
= |i j | (4)
|xi (yj+1 yj ) + yi (xj xj+1 ) + (xj+1 yj xj yj+1 )|
Hdij = 
(yi+1 yi )2 + (xj xj+1 )2
(5)
|xj (yi+1 yi ) + yj (xi xi+1 ) + (xi+1 yi xi yi+1 )|
Hdji = 
(yi+1 yi )2 + (xi xi+1 )2
(6)
The similarity calculation is used not only for prior knowl-
edge extraction from DGPS and low precision GPS data but for
crowdsourced data clustering and selection. Thus, we use the
correlation between the vertical distance difference and angular
difference with measuring errors to estimate 1 and 2 .
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4 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS

tively. The measuring errors of STi can also be estimated as:



T i = (10)
N (STi )

where T i is the measuring error of T si , is the sum of
measuring error of each tracking point in STi , i = 1, 2, . . . , l.
The results of T si , T i and P eri are recorded as RSTi =
T si , T i , P eri  and regarded as the prior knowledge of
RGCPK.
3) The Principle of RGCPK: The prior knowledge includes
T and P er derived from RSTj = T sj , T j , P erj , j =
1, 2, . . . , l. T is regarded as the threshold of clustering and
Fig. 4. Similarity of vector pairs. The similarities of some vector pairs are P er is used to select high-precision data from entire clusters.
shown in the yellow rectangle window. The key steps of the RGCPK are as follows:

Step 1: Initialize the cluster label of all trajectory vectors as

Given a set of GPS trajectories T = T race1 , T race2 , . . . ,
un-clustered and the current cluster label CCL = 0;
T races , its synchronized DGPS trajectories are denoted as
Step 2: Select a trajectory vector labeled un-clustered from
DT = Dt1 , Dt2 , . . . , Dts . The position accuracy of DT and
the trajectory randomly as seed trajectory vector v s and
T is 0.5 m and 1015 m respectively. So T is regarded as
label it as CL (v s ) = CCL , as shown in Fig. 5(a).
measurements and DT with high-accuracy actually refers to
Step 3: Search the adjacent trajectory vector of v s , denoted by
the truth value of T . Let T racei = p1 , p2 , . . . , pn , Dti =
v sn. v s and v sn are merged as one cluster and labeled
rp1 , rp2 , . . . , rpn , T racei T , Dti DT , i = 1, 2, . . . , s,
as CL (v sn ) = CCL if they satisfy: Sim(vs , v sn ) > T s,
their trajectory vectors are denoted as: T v i = v 1 , v 2 , . . . ,
where Sim(v s , v sn ) is the similarity between v s and
v n1 , Dv i = rv 1 , rv2 , . . . , rvn1 . The difference of ver-
v sn , and T is the similarity threshold.
tical distance and angle between T v i and Dv i are calcu-
Step 4: Take v sn as seed trajectory vector v s . Return to Step 3,
lated and denoted as: Di = d1 , d2 , . . . , dn1 , Ai = a1 , a2 ,
as shown in Fig. 5(b).
. . . , an1 , i = 1, 2, . . . , s. The measurement error of T can
Step 5: One cluster is acquired when the seed trajectory vec-
also be signed as: i = 1 , 2 , . . . , n , j = |pj rpj |, i =
tor v s cannot be merged with its adjacent trajectory
1, 2, . . . , s, j = 1, 2, . . . , n. Then 1 and 2 are estimated as:
vectors v sn . Then, let CCL = CCL + 1, and return to

s Step 2.
rD Step 6: Repeat Step 25 until all the trajectory vectors in the
1
i=1


1 = (7) trajectory are labeled, as shown in Fig. 5(c).
ss 
s
Step 7: Put the clusters as trajectory vectors and further merge
rD + rA
i=1 i=1 the clusters using these steps. The final result of clus-
2 = 1 1 (8) tering is shown in Fig. 5(d).
Step 8: After clustering, P er is regarded as the selectivity for
where rD and rA are the correlation of Di and i , Ai and i , data selection. The proportion of tracking points of
and can be estimated based on the covariance matrix. each cluster of the total is computed. All clusters are
2) The Prior Knowledge of RGCPK Extraction: The similar- sorted in descending order according to their propor-
ity SimT racei , DTi  of T racei and DTi can be computed tion and summed from the first value until the accu-
according to the similarity evaluation model, and the results re- mulated value is satisfied, P er. Then those aggregated
corded as T racei = (p1 , s1 ), (p2 , s2 ), . . . , (pn , sn ), where sj clusters are regarded as the high-precision data and
is the similarity value of v j and rv j , and sj is recorded as selected from all clusters, as shown in Fig. 5(e).
the similarity value of pj according to the tendency of moving
object, sn1 = sn , j = 1, 2, . . . , n, as shown in Fig. 4.
A high value of similarity indicates a higher positional ac- C. Lane-Based Road Information Collection
curacy of tracking point. Assuming that T s = T s1 , T s2 , . . . , 1) The Principle of Number and Locations of Traffic Lanes
T sl  is the threshold set of similarity and STi represents the
Detection: We fit a Constrained Gaussian Mixture Model
data set which is satisfied T si , STi T . Then the percentage (CGMM) to perpendicular cross sections of the traces across
of STi is calculated as: the road, based on the assumption that GPS trajectories will
N (STi ) tend to cluster near the center of each lane with some spread due
P eri = (9) to GPS noise and other vagaries. The CGMM can be defined as:
N (T )

k  
1 (x j )2
where P eri represent the percentage of STi , N (STi ) and p(x) = j exp (11)
N (T ) are the number of tracking points of STi and T , respec- j=1 2 2 2 2
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TANG et al.: CLRIC: COLLECTING LANE-BASED ROAD INFORMATION VIA CROWDSOURCING 5

Fig. 5. The basic principle of RGCPK.

where k is the number of Gaussian components, each com-

ponent corresponds to each lane, providing an automatic lane
count; w1 . . . wk are the weight of each component, correspond-
ing to the relative traffic volume in each lane. The weights have
to be positive and normalized, that is, wj > 0, j = 1, 2, . . . , k,
and w1 + w2 + . . . wk = 1. The parameters 1 . . . k are the
mean of the trajectories for each component and equal to the
centerline of each lane; is the standard variance of the trajec-
tories for each component and are set to same value because the
width of each lane of adjacency lane usually is the same. The
expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm is used to infer
(m) (m) (m)
the unknown parameter: j (j , j , (m) ) where m
Fig. 6. The raw tracking points, (a) shows the real image data of intersection
is the number of iterations. The concrete procedure on how to and (b) is the raw GPS records around it.
(m)
get parameter: j was obtained from [4].
The key task in the CGMM model is selecting the number
However, low-end GPS devices and urban canyons mean that
of components for a CGMM. A common practice is to estimate
GPS tracking points deviate from original positions. As shown
k {wi , i , i }k for a set of ks, i = 1, 2, . . . k, and then select
in Fig. 6(b), a lot of tracking points deviate from original
the k that minimizes the following function:
positions and their proportion of total is far more than 5%. So
1

n the regularizer RLS in [4] is not suitable for confirmation of the

Rsrm (p(xi |k )) = L (xi , p(xi |k ))+J(p(xi |k )) (12) number of lanes from GPS data at 1015 m accuracy.
n i=1
In this paper, we present a new regularizer J(p(xi |k )) for
confirmation of the number of lanes, as shown in equation (15).
k = min (Rsrm (p(xi |k ))) (13)  2
DW
L (xi , p(xi |k )) = log (p(xi |k )) (14) J (p(xi |k )) = JTSW (p(xi |k )) = k (15)
k

where Rsrm (p(xi |k )) is the structural risk model (structural 

n 
k 
k1 
n
risk minimization, SRM), L(xi , p(p(xi |k ))) is the empirical
1
n +n ij (j 1)xi n1 j+1 j xi
k i=1 j=1 j=1 i=1
risk model used to evaluate the goodness of fit, J(p(xi |k )) is a = 2
regularization term that penalizes complex models, and > 0 
k1 
k1
j+1 j 2 + n j+1 j
is the regularization parameter. Equation (12) shows a trade- j=1 j=1
off between model fitness and model complexity in order to (16)
achieve good generalization.
The authors in reference [4] proposed a new regularizer, RLS where Dw is the spread width of optimized trajectories, the
based on the relation between the number of lanes and the total value of (Dw/k) refers to the width of lane, k is the
spread of trajectories, their test results show the advantages change between two adjacent j s that equals the detected lane
when compared to other methods such as Akaike information width, j = 1, 2, . . . , k. Equation (15) indicates the consis-
criterion (RAIC ) and Bayesian information criterion (RBIC ). tency degree of (Dw/k) and k . Equation (16) shows the
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6 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS

Fig. 7. Lane centerline. (a) is the fitting result of CGMM and the location of each lane is shown in (b).

Fig. 8. The detection of the number of lanes.

Fig. 10. The construction rule of road. Part1 and Part2 are the most likely parts
of road to add lanes.

The details of the method are as follows:

Fig. 9. Width detection method.
/Initialization/
k
calculation of . The reasoning process and explanation of Coordinate origin: Roi; i = 1, 2, . . . , t.
the parameters are as in [4]. According to (11), the parameter horizontal axis: the direction of the road centerline;
i reflects the location of each lane, as shown in Fig. 7. longitudinal axis: U yi = 0; Dyi = 0;
2) Identification and Optimization of the Number of Lanes: Sliding window: length = rh; width = w; Proportion = 0;
The accuracy of the number of lanes detection has a great /Assignment/
impact on the locations and turning rules for lane extraction. for each Sampling cross sections, do
Given a set of trajectories AT which start from Intersection1 repeat
and end at Intersection2 , the number of traffic lanes is detected Moving the sliding window along the positive
based on the CGMM. direction and negative direction of the longi-
As shown in Fig. 8, we choose a rectangular window to sam- tudinal axis and accumulating the Proportion
ple cross sections and the length and width of rectangle window (Proportion=current points number in sliding
are set as rh and rw. Then we fit a CGMM to the intersections window/all points in the current sampling cross
between the GPS trajectories and a sampling line perpendicular sections)
to the road centerline, and according to (12)(16) confirm the until Proportion == 100%
number of lanes and record them as N lanei , i = 1, 2, . . . , t. set Dwi = maximum |U yi | + |maximum|Dyi |;
In addition, the spread width of optimized trajectories Dw set Coordinate origin changed to Roi+1; U yi+1 =
in sampling cross sections are acquired by Width Detection Al- 0; Dyi+1 = 0;
gorithm. The direction of a road centerline and a sampling line end for
are set as the horizontal axis and longitudinal axis, respectively.
The intersection between sampling line and road centerline is In most cases, the value of N lanei between two intersections
set as the origin, as shown in Fig. 9. The width of sliding always remains the same except when adding lanes at an inter-
window w can be set at any value as long as in the scope of section, as shown in Fig. 10. But some incorrect classifications
desired precision and the length of sliding window is same as for number of lanes still exist due to the effects of uncertain
the length of rectangular window. traffic flows in each lane or inaccuracies in the GPS data.
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TANG et al.: CLRIC: COLLECTING LANE-BASED ROAD INFORMATION VIA CROWDSOURCING
Fig. 11. The collection of DGPS trajectories and synchronized GPS trajectories, (a) shows the driving region of shuttle vehicles, (b) is the magnification of (a) that
the black points and blue points represent GPS data and DGPS data respectively.
Fig. 12. Crowdsourcing data: collected by taxis, (a) indicates the road network for taxi driving and (b) shows the raw trajectories collected by taxis.
Thus, we present a method to optimize the results of the
number of lanes extraction, as follows.
First, comparing N lanei+1 with N lanei and N lanei+2 ,
N lanei+1 is replaced by N lanei when N lanei and N lanei+1
are different, and N lanei and N lanei+2 are the same.
Secondly, clustering the results from Step 1 according to the
value of N lanei and their arrangement, for instance N lanee ,
N lanee+1 , N lanee+2 , . . . , N lanee+c will be clustered when
their value is same, e < t, e + c < t. Each cluster also corre-
sponds to a number of lanes. Assuming there are s clusters, and
recorded as Cj = N lj , ncj , where N lj is the number of lanes
of cluster Cj , ncj is the total number of N lanei that belong to
Cj , j = 1, 2, . . . , s.
Finally, comparing Cj+1 with Cj , N lj+1 of Cj+1 is replaced
by N lj of Cj when N lj+1 and N lj are different, and ncj+1 <
cv, where cv is a constraint value that depends largely on the
road construction rules.
IV. E XPERIMENTS
CLRIC includes two steps high-precision data selection and
lane-based information extraction. Thus, to evaluate the perfor-
mance of CLRIC, we used two different types of data sets a
training data set of ten shuttle vehicle traces and a test data set of
thousands of taxi GPS traces, and both data sets were collected
in urban area. The training data set was used to extract priori
knowledge for high-precision data selection and verify the
7
performance of region growing clustering with prior knowledge
method. The test data set was applied to as the main data
source for lane-based information extraction. Two data sets are
introduced as follows.
The training data set was collected by shuttle vehicles. Each
shuttle vehicle was equipped with a GPS logger and Inertial
Measurement Unit (IMU) that recorded two kinds of traces,
GPS traces based on the GPS single-point positioning technique
and synchronized DGPS traces based on differential global
positioning technology. The positional accuracy of the GPS
and DGPS data in urban area was about 1015 m and 0.5 m
respectively. The sampling rate for the training data set was 1 s.
The data collection period for the shuttle vehicles was seven
days. We obtained about 40 thousand GPS and DGPS points,
shown in Fig. 11. The prior knowledge for high-precision data
selection from the crowdsourcing data was extracted from part
of the training data set by analyzing the similarity of DGPS data
and its synchronized GPS data. The remaining training trajec-
tory data were used to evaluate the performance of RGCPK.
The test data set were collected by thousands of taxis based
on point position technique in Wuhan; the GPS devices were
placed at the center of the taxi roofs. The sampling frequency
of taxi traces ranged from 10 s to 20 s while the positioning ac-
curacy for them ranged from 10 m to 15 m in urban areas. Each
taxi recorded traces for an average of 14 days. We collected
about 200 billion GPS points, shown in Fig. 12. According to
each tracking point location and heading direction, we got about
 This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination.
8 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS
Fig. 13. A part of training data set. Red marks and blue marks represent GPS
data and its high-precision synchronized DGPS data.
1000 trajectory segments based on clustering and partitioning
method [31], and the counts of trajectories of each trajectory
segment range from 100 to 1000. Those trajectory segments
represent one-way road and start from one intersection and end
at another intersection.
A. Region Growing Clustering With Prior Knowledge
(RGCPK) for High-Precision Data Selection
The RGCPK is the first step in the CLRIC system. We took
a part of the trajectories from training data set as samples
as shown in Fig. 13. The weights in the similarity evaluation
model are estimated by (7) and (8) as shown in Table I.
The similarity degree of each tracking point is estimated
according to the similarity evaluation model of trajectories
vectors. We analyzed the measured value of error (T /m) and
the proportion of the data set (P eri ) under different similarity
thresholds (T s). The similarity threshold (T s), measurement
error (T /m), and percentage of the total data set it represents
(P er) are shown in Table II.
In Table II, T s, T and P er represent the similarity thresh-
old, measurement error and selectivity, respectively but T
indicates the expectation quality for data selection.
We picked 0.71 as the clustering threshold when our expecta-
tion quality was 3 m, and 55.4% is regarded as the selectivity for
data selection from all clusters based on RGCPK. Fig. 14 shows
the results of RGCPK for the test data set and a part of training
data set. The red-solid points and black-empty circles represent
the high-precision data and outliers, respectively.
B. Detection of the Number and Locations of Traffic Lanes
(0) (0)
The initial estimates j , j , (0) (j = 1 . . . k) are as-
signed as: k = 2, 3, 4, 5 because there are four types of traffic
lanes designated by the road construction standards in China;
(0) (0)
1 . . . k are the centerlines for each possible lane and
acquired by segmenting the road from road centerlines with
equal interval (set to 3.5 m); (0) is the half width of a lane and
set as 1.75 m according to road construction standards in China.
Values of regularization parameter and other parameters in
TABLE I
T HE W EIGHTS OF S IMILARITY E VALUATION M ODEL
TABLE II
T HE P RIOR K NOWLEDGE E XTRACTION
equation (16) are recommended by [4]. The rh and rw of
rectangle window were set to 5 m and 50 m based on the road
construction standards; The width of one-way road is smaller
than 50 m in China and adding a lane on a road generally occurs
within 50 m of an intersection.
Given a set of optimized trajectories S T that start from one
intersection and end at another intersection, and 120 thousand
tracking points, the number and locations of lanes were detected
as follows:
1) The Number of Traffic Lanes Detected Using Optimized
Constraint Gaussian Mixture Model (CGMM): As shown in
Fig. 15, we trained CGMM with k = 2, 3, 4, 5, on a sample
s1 from S T , containing 4,000 data points. The densities of
those CGMMs and their individual components, multiplied by
the number of data points, are shown in (a), (b), (c) and (d),
respectively. The number of lanes of s1 was identified using
equation (12)(16).
The number of lanes of s1 is 4 according to computational
results. Then we fit CGMMs to each sample from S T with k,
and calculated the number of lanes of all samples, k = 2, 3, 4,
5, as shown in Fig. 16. The true value of the number of lanes
of S T was obtained by field observation. From Fig. 16, we see
that incorrect lane number identification exists in the results.
2) Result Optimization: The process of result optimization
was used to improve the accuracy of lane number identification.
As shown in Fig. 17, incorrect identifications are re-identified
based on the result optimization algorithm. A constraint value
cv is set to 3 due to the road construction standard that stipulates
that adding lanes happens within 50 m of an intersection and for
bus stops as the length of bus stop is more than 10 m.
As a complement to the lane number measures, Fig. 18
presents a visualization of the location of each lane of S T where
red lines depict the centerline of each lane.
From Fig. 18, we see that the accuracy of the location of each
lane depends largely on the accuracy of extraction of lane num-
ber identification. The incorrect identifications of the number of
lanes lead to wrong place of the location of each lane. Misiden-
tifications of the number of lanes seen in Fig. 18 also indicate
that our method has difficulty dealing with data sets from com-
plex intersections; that have different traffic flows between adja-
cent lanes caused by the traffic lights; or where there are driving
restrictions. In addition, the centerlines of each lane on a one-
way road cannot be connected without gaps using our method.
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TANG et al.: CLRIC: COLLECTING LANE-BASED ROAD INFORMATION VIA CROWDSOURCING 9

Fig. 14. High-precision data selection; (a) indicates the result of test data set selection, and (b) shows the selecting results of a part of training data set. The
red-solid points and black-empty circles represent outliers and high-precision data.

Fig. 15. CGMM results. (a), (b), (c) and (d) indicate the overview of k = 2, k = 3, k = 4, k = 5, respectively.

Fig. 16. The lane detection results. The black-solid points and red-empty
circles represent the true value and detection results for the number of lanes.
C. Quantitative Evaluation
1) The Performance of Region Growing Clustering With
Prior Knowledge Method (RGCPK): To evaluate the perfor-
mance of the proposed RGCPK, we implemented RGCPK on
two data sets seen in Fig. 19. The first data set from the training
data set that was used to estimate the accuracy of selected data
and the other is used to identify the performance of RGCPK for
lane number identification.
Fig. 17. The optimized results of the number of lanes detection. The blue-
empty circles and black-solid points represent the optimized results and truth
value of the number of lanes.
The measurement errors of the selected data points were
computed along with synchronized DGPS data. The results
show that the position accuracy of selected data can achieve
3.02 1.2 m, where 3.02 m is the average value and 1.2 m is
the standard deviation.
For test data set, we could not estimate the position ac-
curacy of selected data because there was no high-precision
synchronized DGPS data. Thus, the performance of RGCPK
for crowdsourcing data was evaluated by comparing it with the
 This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination.
10
Fig. 18. The locations of each lane, where the yellow line depicts the centerline
of each lane and the white line shows the incorrect identification of lane
centerline.
Fig. 19. The results of RGCPK using data from the training data set, where
red-empty circles depict the selected data marks and blue points show the
synchronized DGPS data points of those selected data points.
accuracy of the lane number identification in the test data set
before and after optimization. Based on this, the accuracy of
lane number identification for selected data from crowdsourc-
ing data is 85.2%, but the accuracy of lane number identification
of raw test data set only reach to 42.3%.
2) Quantitative Evaluation for Lane Number Identification:
The quantitative evaluation of our lane number identification
was done by comparing it to human-interpreted results. This
comparison shows that the proposed method CLRIC achieved
good performance in extracting lane numbers at an overall
accuracy of 85.2%; however, there was also a 14.8% chance
of incorrectly identifying the number of lanes. In urban area, it
is a challenging task to mine lane-based information from low-
precision crowdsourcing data especially for roads with complex
intersections, viaducts or tunnels. In summary, the reasons for
the incorrect identification include: our method cannot distin-
guish trajectories from roads on and below viaducts, since the
experimental data had no elevation information. The lane infor-
mation for overlapping roads in the study area was misclassified;
the number of lanes can be missed because of GPS signal-loss
in tunnels; our method has difficulty dealing with data sets from
complex intersections which mixed with viaducts.
In addition, to evaluate the performance of CLRIC, we
presented a qualitative comparison of lane number identifi-
cation based on CLRIC, Constraint Gaussian Mixture Model
(CGMM) [4] and Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) [29]. The
results of the number of lane identification comparisons us-
ing test data set are shown in Table III. According to these
results, the CLRIC system employing region growing cluster-
ing with prior knowledge and optimized constraint Gaussian
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS
TABLE III
L ANE N UMBER I DENTIFICATION C OMPARISONS
Fig. 20. Lane width comparison between detecting value and actual value.
mixture model, achieved the highest prediction precision when
compared to two other classification models. The comparison
experiment also shows that methods in [4] and [29] rely too
much on positional accuracy and sampling rate.
3) Evaluation for the Location of Lane Extraction: To eval-
uate the location of each lane extraction, we randomly select
about 200 trajectories segments from test data set as the sample
data, and compare the detecting lane width () of those
samples with the actual lane width. The actual lane width of
those samples is extracted by field measurement. Based on the
measurement results there are two basic types of lane width in
sample data: 3.75 m (type1) and 3.5 m (type2). From Fig. 20,
most detecting lane width () is higher than the actual value
either for type1 or for type2. The standard deviation of for
type1 and type2 is 0.1904 and 0.2337 respectively. The average
value of difference between detecting results and true value
of lane width for type1 and type2 is 0.3564 m and 0.4585 m
respectively, which indicates the locations of lane extraction of
type1 are slightly better than type2, but both of them are not
completely close to the actual lane width.
These differences between the detecting value and the actual
value of different types of lane width are caused by the canyon
streets which lead to the positional accuracy of GPS data in dif-
ferent areas existing difference. In urban area, the positional ac-
curacy of GPS data collected in the street with low-rise buildings
is better than those collected in the streets with high-rise build-
ings. In the future work, we will study deeply on this problem.
V. C ONCLUSION
In this paper, we propose CLRIC, an automated method to
extract lane-based information such as the number and loca-
tions of traffic lanes on a road via crowdsourcing. CLRIC filters
the high-precision GPS data from the raw trajectories using
region growing clustering with prior knowledge, and mines
the number and locations of traffic lanes through optimized
constrained Gaussian mixture model, which is promised to
be a low-cost and real-time way to collect lane-based road
information. However, the proposed method still has room for
improvement, and our future work will focus on the extraction
of lane information under complex road environments such as
under tunnels and overpasses.
 This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination.
TANG et al.: CLRIC: COLLECTING LANE-BASED ROAD INFORMATION VIA CROWDSOURCING
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Luliang Tang received the Ph.D. degree from
Wuhan University, Wuhan, China, in 2007. He is
currently a Professor with Wuhan University. His
research interests include spacetime GIS, GIS for
transportation, and change detection.
Xue Yang received the M.Eng. degree from Wuhan
University, Wuhan, China, in 2013. She is currently
working toward the Ph.D. degree in the State Key
Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying,
Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University.
Her research interests include intelligent transporta-
tion system, spatiotemporal data analysis, and infor-
mation mining.
Zhen Dong received the M.Eng. degree from Wuhan
University, Wuhan, China, in 2013. He is currently
working toward the Ph.D. degree in the State Key
Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying,
Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University,
Wuhan University. His research interests include in-
telligent transportation system, computer vision, and
LiDAR data processing.
Qingquan Li received the Ph.D. degree in geograph-
ic information system (GIS) and photogrammetry
from Wuhan Technical University of Surveying and
Mapping, Wuhan, China, in 1998. He is currently
a Professor with Shenzhen University, Guangdong,
China, and Wuhan University, Wuhan. His research
areas include dynamic data modeling in GIS, sur-
veying engineering, and intelligent transportation
system.