Automatic generation of outline-based representations of landmark buildings with distinctive shapes

Abstract Landmark buildings are salient features for spatial cognition on maps. Distinctive outlines are the major visual characteristics that separate landmark buildings from their surrounding environments. The automatic symbolization of landmark outlines facilitates recognition and map production. As users often recognize landmarks by the outlines of their façades from a street view, this study proposes an automatic method for automatically generating representations of the outlines of landmark buildings in four steps: (1) extract outlines from street-view photographs using GrabCut method, (2) vectorize the extracted building outlines, (3) simplify outline shapes, and (4) symbolize the simplified building outlines in three dimensions (3D). We used the proposed method to generate test data with symbolized outlines for eight buildings in a real-world environment for a wayfinding experiment in which the subjects used the building representations to identify landmark buildings and evaluated their perception of the generated maps. The subjects successfully recognized these buildings based on the symbolized outlines on a map, expressed satisfaction with the manually generated 3D symbols, and reported the same or similar ease of building recognition using 2D or 3D symbolized outlines.