If I may, from technical point of view. For route matching do you use geo spacial index or Fréchet distance or smth other?
I use Google’s S2Geometry library for tiling and spacial indexes and Ramer Douglas Peucker algorithm to simplify paths. It was way more complicated than I expected. I assumed route matching would be a “solved problem” with a nice library function “how similar is this route to this GPS path”. No such luck. But I am happy with how it turned out.
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Would it be possible to prefill the route name with something? E.g. the nearest locality from a reverse geocode
I did consider that but Garmin does that anyway so I didn’t think it would add much value. When you edit a route the name is taken from the most recent activity.
For my Suunto watch it results in fun route name auto completions such as Evening TrailRun or Afternoon MountainBikeRide, or even 4 x 1.3km @ {pace details} {HR details} if I use the intervals on it. Hammerhead also by default gives my activities detailed names such as Evening Ride.
Really love this feature. One issue I’ve encountered (and haven’t been able to find any discussion on it) is that I have one route 55km which seems to grab a separate but similar route (2K diff in length but about 5K diff in GPS path). I have been trying to figure out how to pull the 57km routes out of the 55km route and create a separate route for them. I’ve tried applying route option to see if it will re-process and see the difference, but that didn’t work for me. Any suggestions?
Chiming in to say that I’ve done the same route twice but it wasn’t automatically detected as such by intervals. Let me know how I can help the troubleshooting. For reference, it is those ROUTE IDs :
- 1410222
- 1400025
Did you define the route from the first ride?
If they are only slightly different, you can also ‘Merge’ the routes to make them detectable as the same route.
No I haven’t. Do I need to do that for it to automatically detect them?
This would defy the purpose of the feature, no? They’re not different at all. Did the same route twice.
Yes, once you have defined the route, the next one will get the same name, tags and eventually the commute flag as per your settings.
Go do that for the first one and your second one should reflect that if you re-analyse.
If you happen to do the same route often with only minor differences, then you can merge those that are not detected equal and the differences will be ignored, making it auto-detected the next time.
The start and finish points of those routes are far enough apart for them to be considered separate. As MedTechCD says you can merge them so they are considered the same in future. Route matching was always going to be too fuzzy for some people and not fuzzy enough for others. So I went with “not very fuzzy” matching and manual merge.
You do not have to edit the route and give it a name etc. for matching.
Have you taken into account the Privacy circle? Not sure if that affects the route matching. If you had, I wasn’t thinking a corner would make a difference between the route matching. Good to know we can push our own “algorithm” 
No privacy circles are ignored because the routes are private.
Does intervals ignore the direction of the route? I do open water swimming at a venue with they switch between clockwise and anticlockwise, and intervals appears to match both with the same route.
Not an issue, just curious.
No it does consider the direction, but if all the points on the route are close together it might consider it one route.
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Manuel, just out of interest:
when you say you create your own segments on Intervals, are you doing this by labelling a section of the ride?
And this section is recognised every time you ride it? Or is it recognised only when you travel the same route?
I am curious as I have a number of labelled sections and these are not automatically recognised in Intervals. Do I miss something here or how did you do this?
thanks
Ciao,
as you say you can give a label to your segment as you showed. Unfortunately it is not recognized for other activities, you have to rename it for each workout, it is not automatic. It is a request that I made to the developer, but to date it has not been implemented, because it seems to be under Strava patent
thank you Manuel, that makes sense and its like expected.
best
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I’m always amazed at what people are able to patent.
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