A polygonal buildings aggregation method considering obstacle elements and visual clarity

Abstract

A polygonal building aggregation method is proposed in this study to address the shortcomings of existing aggregation methods that mostly focus on maintaining a few features, ignoring the requirement for a clear expression. First, visually conglutinated buildings were clustered considering obstacle elements. Unreasonable triangles, starting from the marginal triangles, were removed to extract the visual conglutinate areas. Bridging modes were designed and local shape features were considered to bridge the visual conglutinate areas. Then, the contours of the aggregated results were established through a minimum loop search on the path connection graph. An experiment was conducted using the data of OpenStreetMap from Nanjing, and the comparative experimental results showed that the proposed method preserved the aggregated results of right-angled and locally shaped features. The advantages of improving the visual clarity of the results were verified by introducing degrees of visual conglutination and complexity.