Quality Assessment for Polygon Generalization

Abstract

ABSTRACT:Different methods for map generalization have been developed. However, there are only a few publications that discuss the automatic quality assessment of generalized maps. This problem becomes crucial when the usefulness of a map has to be evaluated or different methods need to be compared, e.g. to find the best algorithm for a specific application. In this paper we present a new approach for the quality assessment of generalized polygons. In particular the simplification of buildings and the generalization of polygons that represent land use in a topographic database are discussed. Our approach distinguishes between two aims of generalization: Reducing the amount of data and keeping the map similar to the input map. A measure of quality that defines a compromise between these conflicting objectives is introduced. The proposed method was tested for a German cadastral data set and the official German topographic database ATKIS.