Outside-in: an alternative approach to forest map digitizing

Abstract

ABSTRACT Abstract. This paper examines the problem of polygon digitizing, and suggests an inversion of the traditional approach for polygons of the environmental type, where each individual polygon, rather than its boundaries, is of primary interest. Many workers in geology, forestry, soil science, etc. have found the tedious specification of boundary arcs and their topological linkage and editing to be a major block to productivity. An alternative digitizing approach is described using Thiessen/Voronoi polygons to generate topology automatically and to reduce map digitizing times significantly. The digitizing of representative points within each polygon is performed using the GIS. The stand-alone Voronoi polygon building and boundary extraction module then generates linked arcs that are returned to the GIS for further analysis. Examples of the productivity enhancement in a production environment are given, along with the algorithms used.