A morphing approach for continuous generalization of linear map features

With the development of web maps, people are no longer satisfied with fixed and limited scale map services but want to obtain personalized and arbitrary scale map data. Continuous map generalization technology can be used to generate arbitrary scale map data. This paper proposes a morphing method for continuously generalizing linear map features using shape context matching and hierarchical interpolation (SCM-HI). More specifically, shape characteristics are quantitatively described by shape context on which shape similarity is measured based on a chi-square method; then, two levels of interpolation, skeleton and detail interpolations, are employed to generate the geometry of intermediate curves. The main contributions of our approach include (1) exploiting both the geometry and spatial structure of a vector curve in shape matching by using shape context, and (2) preserving both the main shape structure as-rigid-as-possible and local geometric details as gradual and smooth as possible for intermediate curves by hierarchical interpolation. Experiments show that our method generates plausible morphing effects and can thus serve as a robust approach for continuous generalization of linear map features.