Integrating douglas-peucker line simplification into routeboxer algorithm on a map-based Android application

A map-based application is, by and large, useful to search for information about locations or places. The application, such as Google Maps, provides commuting or navigation information of a particular place. With the mobile version of Google Maps, people can get such information directly from their mobile devices. Google also has a directions interface that supports finding a navigational path between two specified locations. In recognizing an area surrounding the path, there is an algorithm to support that functionality, namely RouteBoxer. The recognized surrounding area can be utilized further by the application to identify places nearby. In finding a path's surrounding area, the RouteBoxer algorithm defines a grid of rectangles that cover the whole path and marks rectangles nearby by traversing the path. However, the algorithm's computational performance becomes unacceptably slow when the path contains many path points. The RouteBoxer algorithm accepts a collection of geolocation points to represent the path and a user-specified distance away from the path to identify the area surrounding the path. This research measures the algorithm performance while incorporating the Douglas-Peucker line simplification algorithm to reduce the number of points processed by the RouteBoxer algorithm, hence improve its processing performance. An experiment shows that the path simplification process reduces up to 99% points of a path, improves the original RouteBoxer calculation performance up to 87.8 times faster, and maintains its precision above 92.6%.