A Multilevel Road Alignment Model for Spatial-Query-by-Sketch

Ming Tang,Zoe Falomir,Yehua Sheng

doi:10.3390/app10217685

Abstract

A sketch map represents an individual’s perception of a specific location. However, the information in sketch maps is often distorted and incomplete. Nevertheless, the main roads of a given location often exhibit considerable similarities between the sketch maps and metric maps. In this work, a shape-based approach was outlined to align roads in the sketch maps and metric maps. Specifically, the shapes of main roads were compared and analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively in three levels pertaining to an individual road, composite road, and road scene. An experiment was performed in which for eight out of nine maps sketched by our participants, accurate road maps could be obtained automatically taking as input the sketch and the metric map. The experimental results indicate that accurate matches can be obtained when the proposed road alignment approach Shape-based Spatial-Query-by-Sketch (SSQbS) is applied to incomplete or distorted roads present in sketch maps and even to roads with an inconsistent spatial relationship with the roads in the metric maps. Moreover, highly similar matches can be obtained for sketches involving fewer roads.

Highlights

With the widespread availability of the internet, people can create, publish, or query spatial data through web-based geographic information systems (GIS), such as volunteered geographic information (VGI) [1]
To represent a individual road, the following three features are adopted: (i) shape distance, which indicates the distance between two roads in terms of the shape (Section 3.2.2); (ii) number of critical turning points, which describes the curvature of individual roads (Section 3.2.3); and (iii) circulation direction, which indicates the direction of two adjacent road segments (Section 3.2.4)
This paper proposes a shape-based approach for spatial-query-by-sketch, known as Shaped-based

Summary

Introduction

With the widespread availability of the internet, people can create, publish, or query spatial data through web-based geographic information systems (GIS), such as volunteered geographic information (VGI) [1]. Geographic information systems can store, analyze, and visualize a variety of spatial information. Spatial query is one of the commonly used means of manipulating geographic information for individual citizens. It refers to query based on object’s name, location, distance, etc. Professional GIS tools, such as QGIS (https://qgis.org/en/site/), implement this query by first creating the hotel’s buffer, and calculating the intersection of that buffer with the restaurants, shopping malls, etc. This process is obscure for the average users

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