{"id":32546,"date":"2026-01-21T17:02:10","date_gmt":"2026-01-21T17:02:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lamarr-institute.org\/publication\/towards-effective-robust-and-utility-preserving-watermarking-of-gps-trajectories\/"},"modified":"2026-04-13T14:13:29","modified_gmt":"2026-04-13T14:13:29","slug":"towards-effective-robust-and-utility-preserving-watermarking-of-gps-trajectories","status":"publish","type":"publication","link":"https:\/\/lamarr-institute.org\/de\/publication\/towards-effective-robust-and-utility-preserving-watermarking-of-gps-trajectories\/","title":{"rendered":"Towards effective, robust and utility-preserving watermarking of GPS trajectories"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Personal GPS trajectory is essential for businesses and emerging data markets due to its relevance in various data-driven methods, including traffic forecasting, accident prediction, and profiling driving behavior. Watermarking is a method that facilitates verification of data ownership and authenticity by embedding provenance information into the data. Whereas watermarking is commonly adopted in the image and audio domains, only a few initial watermarking methods exist for GPS trajectory data. GPS trajectory watermarking is particularly challenging due to the spatio-temporal data properties and easiness of data modification. As a result, existing watermarking methods often embed only minimal provenance information, lack robustness, and can fail to preserve data utility for downstream applications. In this work, we propose W-Trace &#8211; a novel, effective, robust, and utility-preserving GPS trajectory watermarking method. W-Trace transforms a GPS trajectory into a complex domain and applies the Fourier transformation to decompose the trajectory into the frequency representation. W-Trace embeds watermarks in the frequency representation and verifies them in a spatiotemporally-aware procedure. We demonstrate the effectiveness, robustness, and utility of the proposed W-Trace approach in realistic settings using real-world GPS trajectory datasets. In contrast to the baselines, the proposed W-Trace approach is robust to a wide range of trajectory modifications while preserving the GPS trajectory characteristics required for the downstream applications.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Personal GPS trajectory is essential for businesses and emerging data markets due to its relevance in various data-driven methods, including traffic forecasting, accident prediction, and profiling driving behavior. Watermarking is a method that facilitates verification of data ownership and authenticity by embedding provenance information into the data. Whereas watermarking is commonly adopted in the image and audio domains, only a few initial watermarking methods exist for GPS trajectory data. GPS [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"publication-type":[30],"class_list":["post-32546","publication","type-publication","status-publish","hentry","publication-type-article"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lamarr-institute.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/publication\/32546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lamarr-institute.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/publication"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lamarr-institute.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/publication"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lamarr-institute.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lamarr-institute.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/publication\/32546\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lamarr-institute.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"publication-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lamarr-institute.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/publication-type?post=32546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}