Handling GPS Data with Python

If you have ever happened to need to deal with GPS data in Python you may have felt a bit lost. There are many libraries at various states of maturity and scope. Finding a place to start and to actually work with the GPS data might not be as easy and obvious as you might expect from other Python domains. Inspired from my own experiences of dealing with GPS data in Python, I want to give an overview of some useful libraries. From basic reading and writing GPS tracks in the GPS Exchange Format with the help of gpxpy to adding missing elevation information with srtm.py. Additionally, I will cover mapping and visualising tracks on OpenStreetmap with mplleaflet that even supports interactive plots in a Jupyter notebook. Besides the tooling, I will also demonstrate and explain common algorithms like Douglas-Peucker to simplify a track and the famous Kalman filters for smoothing. For both algorithms I will give an intuition about how they work. Especially the Kalman filter that is used for all kinds of sensor, not only GPS, has the reputation of being hard to understand. Still, its concept is really easy and quite comprehensible. My presentation will make heavy use of the Jupyter notebook which is a wonderful tool perfectly suited for experimenting and learning.

My slides as well as additional notebooks are available on Github.