Archetypes of alternative routes in buildings

Alternative routes have found many applications in navigation scenarios. However, alternative routes have only been introduced recently for the indoor space due to the complexity of these environments. Furthermore, the number of alternative routes in buildings can be quite high. With this paper, we propose to organize sets of alternative routes by employing archetypal analysis on a feature space representation of routes and show results in which a set of hundreds of routes between the same start and end point has been compressed to only a few obviously different archetypal routes. Additionally, the framework allows for comparing routes with archetypes and with each other. This comparison does not reveal spatial similarity alone, but rather a measure of routes' similarity representing their inherent semantic character.