V-Spline: An Adaptive Smoothing Spline for Trajectory Reconstruction

Trajectory reconstruction is the process of inferring the path of a moving object between successive observations. In this paper, we propose a smoothing spline—which we name the V-spline—that incorporates position and velocity information and a penalty term that controls acceleration. We introduce a...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Cao, Zhanglong, Bryant, David, Molteno, Timothy CA, Fox, Colin, Parry, Matthew
Format: Journal Article
Published: 2021
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/83422
Description
Summary:Trajectory reconstruction is the process of inferring the path of a moving object between successive observations. In this paper, we propose a smoothing spline—which we name the V-spline—that incorporates position and velocity information and a penalty term that controls acceleration. We introduce an adaptive V-spline designed to control the impact of irregularly sampled observations and noisy velocity measurements. A cross-validation scheme for estimating the V-spline parameters is proposed, and, in simulation studies, the V-spline shows superior performance to existing methods. Finally, an application of the V-spline to vehicle trajectory reconstruction in two dimensions is given, in which the penalty term is allowed to further depend on known operational characteristics of the vehicle.