A QUADTREE SPATIAL INDEX METHOD WITH INCLUSION RELATIONS FOR THE INCREMENTAL UPDATING OF VECTOR LANDCOVER DATABASE

Abstract. In vector landcover database, there are a lot of complex polygons with many holes, even nesting holes. In the incremental updating (i.e., using the change-only information to update the land cover database), a new changed parcel usually has 2-dimensional intersections (e.g., overlap, cover, equal and inside, etc.) with several existing regions, automatic updating operations need to identify the affected objects for the new changes at first. If the existing parcels include complex polygons (i.e., the polygon with holes), it is still needed to determine if there are 2-dimensional intersections between the new changed polygon and each holes of the involved complex polygons. The relation between the complex polygon and its holes has not been presented in the current spatial data indexing methods, only the MBB (Minimum Bounding Box) of the exterior ring of the complex polygon has been stored, the non-involved holes can not be filtered at the first step of spatial access methods. As the refinement geometric operation is costly, therefore the updating process for the complex polygons is very complicated and low efficient using the current spatial data indexing methods. In order to solve this problem, an improved quadtree spatial index method is presented in this paper. In this method, the polygons is divided to two categories according to the relations with the quadrant axes, i.e., disjoint to the axes and intersect with the axes. The intersect polygons are still divided to 5 cases according to the intersection position among the polygons and the different level quadrant axes. The intersection polygons are stored in the different level root nodes in our index tree, and five buckets denoted as XpB, XnB, YpB, YnB, XYB are used to store the polygons intersecting the different level quadrant axes respectively. The polygons disjoint to all quadrant axes are stored in the leaf nodes in this method. The authors developed the spatial index structure with inclusion relations and the algorithms of the corresponding index operations (e.g., insert, delete and query) for the complex polygons. The effectiveness of the improved index is verified by an experiment of land cover data incremental updating. Experimental results show that the proposed index method is significantly more efficient than the traditional quadtree index in terms of spatial query efficiency, and the time efficiency of the incremental updating is increased about 3 times using the proposed index method than that using the traditional quadtree index.