BOUNDARY SIMPLIFICATION IN CARTOGRAPHY PRESERVING THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SHAPE-FEATURES

In this paper, we assume that cartographic boundaries have features at a variety of different degrees of simplification and therefore each line segment showing a different feature must be simplified at its proper degree. Our boundary simplification method preserves the characteristics of the shape features, and therefore avoids missing line features and overlooking coarse features. Here simplification consists of the dominant points detected on the line which has been segmented previously into a number of parts, each one showing a different feature at an appropriate degree of smoothing. We propose an automatic method to segment the line into a number of nonoverlapping parts, each one revealing a different feature. To find the best degree of simplification for each segment, we select the simplification minimizing a normalized measure of the zeros of curvature of the segment.