Detecting and Analyzing Urban Centers Based on the Localized Contour Tree Method Using Taxi Trajectory Data: A Case Study of Shanghai

Abstract

Urban structure is of vital importance to urban planning, transportation, economics and other applications. Since detecting and analyzing urban centers is crucial for understanding urban structure, a large number of studies on urban center extraction have been performed. In this paper, we propose an analysis framework to identify urban centers by using taxi trajectory data. The proposed approach differs from previous methods by employing a novel way to simulate taxi trajectory data with the topographic surface. We extracted pick-up and drop-off spots from taxi trajectory data and employed the localized contour tree method to delineate the boundaries and hierarchies of urban centers. The experiments show that the proposed method can successfully detect urban centers and analyze their temporal patterns in different periods in Shanghai, China.