A heuristic approach to the generalization of complex building groups in urban villages

Abstract

The generalization of building footprints acts as the basis of multi-scale mapping. Most of the previous studies focus on the generalization of regular building clusters within a wide neighbourhood, but only few has concerned about the generalization of cluttered building clusters within the narrow space such as urban village. The buildings in urban villages show special characteristics in terms of individual properties and group properties, and thus their map generalization processes are often limited. This study proposes a framework to generalize the cluttered building clusters that allows for multi-scale mapping. It first adopts a heuristic method to group adjacent buildings based on the Delaunay triangulation model and then aggregates and simplifies each building group separately. Given that the aggregated buildings in urban villages often show cluttered alignments, our method further trims the jagged boundaries of building footprints by extracting the gap space between neighbouring buildings from the Delaunay triangulation model.