CellSense

Data from the cellular network have been proved as one of the most promising way to understand large-scale human mobility for various ubiquitous computing applications due to the high penetration of cellphones and low collection cost. Existing mobility models driven by cellular network data suffer from sparse spatial-temporal observations because user locations are recorded with cellphone activities, e.g., calls, text, or internet access. In this paper, we design a human mobility recovery system called CellSense to take the sparse cellular billing data (CBR) as input and outputs dense continuous records to recover the sensing gap when using cellular networks as sensing systems to sense the human mobility. There is limited work on this kind of recovery systems at large scale because even though it is straightforward to design a recovery system based on regression models, it is very challenging to evaluate these models at large scale due to the lack of the ground truth data. In this paper, we explore a new opportunity based on the upgrade of cellular infrastructures to obtain cellular network signaling data as the ground truth data, which log the interaction between cellphones and cellular towers at signal levels (e.g., attaching, detaching, paging) even without billable activities. Based on the signaling data, we design a system CellSense for human mobility recovery by integrating collective mobility patterns with individual mobility modeling, which achieves the 35.3% improvement over the state-of-the-art models. The key application of our recovery model is to take regular sparse CBR data that a researcher already has, and to recover the missing data due to sensing gaps of CBR data to produce a dense cellular data for them to train a machine learning model for their use cases, e.g., next location prediction.

Micro-terrain and canopy feature extraction by breakline and differencing analysis of gridded elevation models : identifying terrain model discontinuities with application to off-road mobility modeling

Elevation models derived from high-resolution airborne lidar scanners provide an added dimension for identification and extraction of micro-terrain features characterized by topographic discontinuities or breaklines. Gridded digital surface models created from first-return lidar pulses are often combined with lidar-derived bare-earth models to extract vegetation features by model differencing. However, vegetative canopy can also be extracted from the digital surface model alone through breakline analysis by taking advantage of the fine-scale changes in slope that are detectable in high-resolution elevation models of canopy. The identification and mapping of canopy cover and micro-terrain features in areas of sparse vegetation is demonstrated with an elevation model for a region of western Montana, using algorithms for breaklines, elevation differencing, slope, terrain ruggedness, and breakline gradient direction. These algorithms were created at the U.S. Army Engineer Research Center – Geospatial Research Laboratory (ERDC-GRL) and can be accessed through an in-house tool constructed in the ENVI/IDL environment. After breakline processing, products from these algorithms are brought into a Geographic Information System as analytical layers and applied to a mobility routing model, demonstrating the effect of breaklines as obstacles in the calculation of optimal, off-road routes. Elevation model breakline analysis can serve as significant added value to micro-terrain feature and canopy mapping, obstacle identification, and route planning.