Trajectory classification to support effective and efficient field-road classification

Field-road classification, which automatically identifies in-field activities and out-of-field activities in global navigation satellite system (GNSS) recordings, is an important step for the performance evaluation of agricultural machinery. Although several field-road classification methods based only on GNSS recordings have been proposed, there is a trade-off between time consumption and accuracy performance for such methods. To obtain an optimal balance, it is important to choose a suitable field-road classification method for each trajectory based on its GNSS trajectory quality. In this article, a trajectory classification task was proposed, which classifies the quality of GNSS trajectories into three categories (high-quality, medium-quality, or low-quality). Then, a trajectory classification (TC) model was developed to automatically assign a quality category to each input trajectory, utilizing global and local features specific to agricultural machinery. Finally, a novel field-road classification method is proposed, wherein the selection of field-road classification methods depends on the trajectory quality category predicted by the TC model. The comprehensive experiments show that the proposed trajectory classification method achieved 86.84% accuracy, which consistently outperformed current trajectory classification methods by about 2.6%, and the proposed field-road classification method has obtained a balance between efficiency and effectiveness, i.e., sufficient efficiency with a tolerable accuracy loss. This is the first attempt to examine the balance problem between efficiency and effectiveness in existing field-road classification methods and to propose a trajectory classification specific to these methods. © 2024 Chen et al.