Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Pattern Recognition and Typification of Ditches
Savino Sandro, Rumor Massimo, Zanon Matteo
University of Padua, Department of Information Engineering
via Gradenigo 6/B 35131 Padua, Italy
sandro.savino@dei.unipd.it
Abstract
This paper will present the algorithms developed for the generalization of
ditches in the CARGEN project. Despite the increasing number of algo-
rithms available for cartographic generalization, only few of them address
directly the problem of typification; noticeably this has been done in the
context of building and road network generalization only. Ditches are man
made features used to carry water, they are commonly found in groups in
rural environments and in maps they are widely used to describe such a
landscape. Groups of ditches usually show a regular pattern of straight
lines, hence they lend themselves to be generalized through typification. In
this paper a novel algorithm for the typification of ditches will be
explained. The algorithm has been developed inside the Italian CARGEN
project, aiming at the automatic generalization of 1:25000 data from
1:5000 data. The first section introduces typification, followed by brief re-
view of related work in section two; the third section gives a description of
the salient features of ditches; all the consideration of section one and three
will be then used to set up a generalization algorithm that is explained in
section four. Section five illustrates the results and gives a perspective on
the future work.
1- Introduction on typification
During the generalization process the cartographic phenomena present in
the original map should be read, interpreted and understood and then given
a new representation that should be able to convey the same information of
the original one or the most important aspects of it. Many different gener-
alization operators have been identified (Agent 2000) and while each of
them has some distinctive features and functions, all of them operate to
