Scale-Aware Cartographic Displacement Based on Constrained Optimization

摘要

The consistent arrangement of map features in accordance with the map scale has recently been technically important in digital cartographic generalization. This is primarily due to the recent demand for informative mapping systems, especially for use in smartphones and tablets. However, such sophisticated generalization has usually been conducted manually by expert cartographers and thus results in a time-consuming and error-prone process. In this paper, we focus on the displacement process within cartographic generalization and formulate them as a constrained optimization problem to provide an associated algorithm implementation and its effective solution. We first identify the underlying spatial relationships among map features, such as points and lines, on each map scale as constraints and optimize the cost function that penalizes excessive displacement of the map features in terms of the map scale. Several examples are also provided to demonstrate that the proposed approach allows us to maintain consistent mapping regardless of changes to the map scale.