A fast algorithm of geometry generalization

Abstract

Map generalization is commonly used in many GIS applications to produce maps with less detail so as to reduce the mapping complexity. Different from common simplifying strategies which simplify individual geometry objects separately, in this paper we consider the problem of generalizing the geometry objects under the topological constraints among the geometries and given constraining points. We propose a Cross-line algorithm to simplify the map while preserving the topological constraints. The proposed algorithm is extensively evaluated on five real map datasets and large synthetic datasets, and the results show that our proposed approach can greatly simplify the map with extremely high correctness and excellent efficiency.