Automatic derivation of on-demand tactile maps for visually impaired people: first experiments and research agenda

Abstract

Tactile maps are essential tools for visually impaired people to comprehend space and to support the simple pedestrian trips made difficult by their disability. Tactile maps are created manually and printed by specialists, and it takes a large amount of time to create a new one, which prevents using them on demand for everyday use. As a consequence, researchers and cartographers try to automate this creation process, but the existing automated derivation processes do not include generalization or advanced stylization steps, which limits their effectiveness. This paper reports first experiments to include such complex automated cartography processes to provide on demand tactile maps for visually impaired people. These first experiments were more intended to raise real research issues than solve them, and the paper discusses these issues in a research agenda to achieve automatically derived tactile maps.

Automatic (Tactile) Map Generation—A Systematic Literature Review

“…After a detailed analysis of the identified primary studies we can agree with the statements that appear in most of the articles, pointing out that automatic generalization processes are important in terms of automatic generation of both traditional and tactile maps [37][38][39]. It can also be noted that automatization of cartographic processes, which seemed impossible a few years ago, is now being successfully implemented in many countries.…”

“…A "micro" agent is a single geographic object (e.g., building), while a "meso" (macro) agent is a composition of "micro" or "meso" agents, as for generalization purposes they have to be considered together (e.g., a set of buildings in a neighborhood). This model is best used in dense [54] and well-structured urban areas [39]. On the other hand, the GAEL model (Generalisation based on Agents and Elasticity) is an extension of the Agent-based model for management of background themes such as relief.…”

“…There are three types of them: legibility constraints, constraints of preservation and of geographic coherence [58]. This model is best used for low density [54], heterogeneous rural areas [39]. In Touya and Duchêne [59] the authors argue that it is impossible to solve the generalization problem with a single model.…”

“…Current trends and a summary of research status in on-demand tactile maps generation were gathered in a review article [39]. Apart from studies identified during the review, there are two other projects worth mentioning.…”

“…The importance of creating unified geographical datasets (RQ3) for automatic (on-demand) tactile map generation was stated in Guillaume Touya et al [39]. The solutions used in NMAs and described in the previous sections employed systems for automatic map generation that derived consecutive DLMs or DCMs from the main spatial database.…”