Compare Tours by Altitude

A tour or only a part of a tour can be compared with other tours. The comparison is done by altitude, comparing by geo position is described here.

Several steps are necessary to compare a tour

Create reference tour

Create Reference Tour


Tour Catalog

A tour which should be compared with other tours is called reference tour, it can be created with these steps.

• Open tour chart
• Select a tour in a view (the tour must be saved)
• Only a part of a saved tour is needed to create a reference tour
• Move vertical sliders in the tour chart to the start and end position, this part represents the reference tour
• Move mouse over a vertical slider and open context menu with the right mouse button
• Select Create Reference Tour...
• In the opened dialog enter the name of the reference tour, the name can be modified later
• Press OK
• The reference tour is displayed in the Reference Tours  view

Compare Wizard

Compare Wizard

• Open compare wizard
  Select reference tour in tour catalog, open context menu, select Compare Tour

• Page: Compare Tours
  Select saved tours which should be compared, tours are grouped by date

• Press Finish, this will start a tour comparison

Compare Result

Compare Result View

The result of the tour comparison is displayed in the Compare Result  view.

How can the result be interpreted?

Because the program is comparing all selected tours, the result shows tours which match the reference tour and which do not.

It's almost impossible to find only the matching tours and discard the not matching tours when the comparison is done by altitude, the compare result must be interpreted.

The compared tours are sorted by the Diff column which means that the top tours in the result have the highest probability to match with the reference tour, but it's possible that they don't match.

Assessment Tool

To make the assessment easier, the reference tour and the compared tour can be synchronized with the synch buttons in the toolbar of the Compared Tour  view.

• Synchronize by scale

• Synchronize by size

When synchronized, the horizontal position and vertical values of the Reference Tour  are set into the graphs of the  Compared Tour. It is also helpful to zoom into the reference tour to cover the horizontal space with the whole graph of the reference tour.

Assign Compare Result

To display the compared tours in the Reference Tours  view, the compared tour must be assigned to the reference tour which can be done with one of these actions:

• Set check box of the compared tours in the  Compare Result  view, open view context menu and select Assign Compare Result
• Press button in  Compared Tour  view

Adjust Compare Result

It is possible that the tour comparison has found the correct tour but do not match 100% horizontally. The horizontal position of the compare result can be move with the mouse by pressing the left mouse button and move the mouse.

The compare result must be reassigned to keep the modifications.

Navigate compared tours

The next and previous tours can be navigated with these actions

The navigation is done with the tours from the Year Statistic  or the Compare Result  views.

Compare Algorithm

How is the most matching tour found?

At first all tours are normalized, the altitude for each tour is computed each 100m.

Afterward the altitude difference with the reference tour is summarized for each 100m slice.

The summarized graph has a minimum value which is most likely the start position for the compared reference tour.

With this action in the Compared Tour,  the computed graph with the altitude difference can be displayed.

As you can see, there is no magic to find the most similar tour. The algorithm is realy fast when tours are loaded from the internal database, the result will not be 1000% correct.

This page is updated for version 22.6