Author Topic: Track Interpolation and Smoothing  (Read 3921 times)

alizhan

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Track Interpolation and Smoothing
« on: April 23, 2005, 11:23:56 PM »
I thought that these used to be on the "to do" list, but I don't see them anymore, and I can't find them in TF.

First, my crappy Magellan unit has a really small tracklog, which means that I often get tracks with fewer points than I would like. Alternately, I get lazy when drawing tracks, and space points widely when the track is straight. What I would like is for TF to insert points into such tracks to where no two adjacent points are more than a given distance apart. This would allow for more effective application of DEM data to the track, as well as providing a wealth of points to match against maps.

Second, some of my drawn tracks have the opposite problem--too many points! When dragging the cursor with the drawing tool, one can get a truly impressive number of points. It would be nice if TF could smooth these tracks down to a given mean inter-point distance.

A single tool could probably accomplish both tasks, with the user defining minimum and maximum inter-point distances. Several different algorithms could be used, with varying degrees of fidelity to the original track.

Alan

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Track Interpolation and Smoothing
« Reply #1 on: April 24, 2005, 04:09:29 PM »
Such a tool exists!  Right click on your track and choose "Spline/Simplify Track".  With this dialog you can add or remove points uniformly using the given controls.

alizhan

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Track Interpolation and Smoothing
« Reply #2 on: April 26, 2005, 07:16:08 PM »
A-ha! I knew I'd seen that somewhere! For some reason, when the cursor is the hand, I just don't think of right-clicking (status bar prompt or no).

Maybe this could be added as a button on the trackpoints tab of the file properties dialog?