AN AREA MERGING METHOD IN MAP GENERALIZATION CONSIDERING THE BOUNDARY CHARACTERISTICS OF STRUCTURED GEOGRAPHIC OBJECTS

Abstract. Merging is an important operation for the generalization of land-cover data. However, current research often entails merging on a global perspective, which is not conducive to capturing the spatial characteristics of geographic objects with significant spatial structures, i.e., structured geographic objects. As such, this paper proposes an area merging method that can maintain the boundary characteristics of the structured geographic objects. First, we identify the structured geographic objects based on the description parameters of the spatial structure. Second, a Miter-type buffer transformation is introduced to extract the boundary of each structured geographic object, and area elements inside the boundary are processed with corresponding merging operations. Finally, the boundary of the structured geographic objects and the merging result of the area elements are inserted back into the aggregated result of the original land-cover data using the NOT operation. The proposed approach is experimentally validated using geographical condition census data for a city in southern China. The experimental validation indicates that the proposed approach not only reasonably identify the typical characteristics of structured geographic objects but also effectively maintains the boundary characteristics of these objects.