AN APPROACH USING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FOR AUTOMATED CARTOGRAPHIC GENERALIZATION

摘要

The process of reducing and modifying the sizes, shapes and numbers of geographical data and representing them within the map space is referred as cartographic generalization. The main objective of generalization is making a clear and legible map, finally a balanced total image, with a good positional accuracy. Map generalization has several processes such as selection, simplification, combination, smoothing, displacement and enhancement. Generalization acts as the key mechanism in the map making process, since it filters out information for different scales and map purposes. Although it is a critical issue to implement a full and comprehensive automated generalization technique, several researchers have attempted to fill up this barrier by introducing various algorithms; it has not achieved yet successful results. This study is discussing about some of the existing generalization techniques and their limitations and the possibility of using the Artificial Intelligence technique for fully automated cartographic generalization.