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Defining the Boundaries of Urban Built-up Area Based on Taxi Trajectories: a Case Study of Beijing

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Abstract

The urban built-up area is of great significance for urban planning, construction, and management, and is an important index to measure the degree of urbanization. This study reviews the definitions of the urban built-up area in different countries and analyzes its basic characteristics. The rational and advantages of defining the urban built-up area using taxi trajectory data are described. First, we preprocessed these data and used the density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) algorithm to cluster the trajectory points. The urban built-up area was defined by the boundaries of each cluster of trajectory points, generated using the Delaunay triangulation method. A parameter decision model was assessed to determine the best-suited parameter for the clustering algorithm. The taxi trajectory data in Beijing were taken as the experimental data, and the urban built-up area generated according to the proposed method shows high consistency with remote sensing images. The results with the proposed method show that the urban built-up area of Beijing comprises a main area and several suburban areas. The main part appears in block form, with some bulges distributed along the city’s main roads. The suburban areas serve as special functional areas of the city and surrounding towns.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to express our gratitude to the National Natural Science Foundation of China for supporting our project.

Funding

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grants 41571399, 41501446, and 41901397.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Information Engineering University, Zhengzhou, 450001, China

    Yuanfu Li, Qun Sun, Xiaolin Ji, Li Xu, Chuanwei Lu & Yunpeng Zhao

Authors
  1. Yuanfu Li
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  2. Qun Sun
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  3. Xiaolin Ji
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  4. Li Xu
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  5. Chuanwei Lu
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  6. Yunpeng Zhao
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Contributions

The corresponding author, Yuanfu Li, proposed the topic and completed most work of the data processing and analysis, as well as the writing of the manuscript. Qun Sun guided the research process and writing of the manuscript and gave many useful advices. Xiaolin Ji, Li Xu, Chuanwei Lu, and Yunpeng Zhao helped in the design, research implementation and analysis, and writing of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Yuanfu Li.

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Li, Y., Sun, Q., Ji, X. et al. Defining the Boundaries of Urban Built-up Area Based on Taxi Trajectories: a Case Study of Beijing. J geovis spat anal 4, 8 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41651-020-00047-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41651-020-00047-6

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