Automatic Generalization of Roads and Buildings

Map generalization simplifies the details of map representation. Automatic generalization has been a hot research topic for decades, but there does not exist a set of universal rules or algorithms that explicitly defines how generalization should be performed. This paper presents a method to automatically generalize roads and buildings. With the proposed method, road generalization and building generalization are carried out consecutively. Road generalization includes Road Modeler, which converts original road edges to road polygons, and Network Generator, which collapses road polygons to road networks. The created network is topologically connected and suitable for GIS (Geographical Information System), such as car navigation systems. Building generalization is mainly composed of clustering building polygons to building clusters, aggregating a building cluster to a polygon, and simplifying both original and aggregated building polygons. Using the created road networks as the constraints for generalizing buildings leads to the generalized results without contradiction. Some experiments have also been implemented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.