MR-V: Line Simplification through Mnemonic Rasterization

Abstract

Linear features (e.g., roads, rivers), outlines of areas (e.g., municipal boundaries, lake banks) or mov ing objects’ trajectories (e.g., humans, vehicles) are represented on paper or digital maps with polyline geometries. Sampling, discretization and generalization processes result in polylines represented by a subset of vertices of the original line. The simplified version of a linear feature may violate some spatial relations (topological, direction or distance) that apply between the original line and some other objects in space, unless a model that considers the context of the neighbouring space is applied. The latter turns the line sim plification into a rather complicated and challenging-to-automate process. This paper introduces a method that supports a consistent line simplification without considering the context of the neighbouring space. The method applies well-known geo-processing tasks, such as polyline-to-raster and raster-topoly l ine conversions, and is compliant with the raster tiled maps as well as the discrete global grid systems.