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DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.COSIT.2024.8

Scalable Harmonious Simplification of Isolines

Authors: Steven van den Broek, Wouter Meulemans, Andreas Reimer, and Bettina Speckmann

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 315, 16th International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2024)

Abstract

Isolines visually characterize scalar fields by connecting all points of the same value by a closed curve at repeated intervals. They work only as a set which gives the viewer an indication of the shape of the underlying field. Hence, when simplifying isolines it is important that the correspondence - the harmony - between adjacent isolines is preserved whenever it is present. The majority of state-of-the-art simplification methods treat isolines independently; at best they avoid collisions between adjacent simplified isolines. A notable exception is the work by Van Goethem et al. (2021) who were the first to introduce the concept of harmony between adjacent isolines explicitly as an algorithmic design principle. They presented a proof-of-concept algorithm that harmoniously simplifies a sequence of polylines. However, the sets of isolines of scalar fields, most notably terrain, consist of closed curves which are nested in arbitrarily complex ways and not of an ordered sequence of polylines. In this paper we significantly extend the work by Van Goethem et al. (2021) to capture harmony in general sets of isolines. Our new simplification algorithm can handle sets of isolines describing arbitrary scalar fields and is more efficient, allowing us to harmoniously simplify terrain with hundreds of thousands of vertices. We experimentally compare our method to the results of Van Goethem et al. (2021) on bundles of isolines and to general simplification methods on isolines extracted from DEMs of Antartica. Our results indicate that our method efficiently preserves the harmony in the simplified maps, which are thereby less noisy, cartographically more meaningful, and easier to read.

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Steven van den Broek, Wouter Meulemans, Andreas Reimer, and Bettina Speckmann. Scalable Harmonious Simplification of Isolines. In 16th International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2024). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 315, pp. 8:1-8:20, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2024)

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@InProceedings{vandenbroek_et_al:LIPIcs.COSIT.2024.8,
  author =	{van den Broek, Steven and Meulemans, Wouter and Reimer, Andreas and Speckmann, Bettina},
  title =	{{Scalable Harmonious Simplification of Isolines}},
  booktitle =	{16th International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2024)},
  pages =	{8:1--8:20},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-330-0},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2024},
  volume =	{315},
  editor =	{Adams, Benjamin and Griffin, Amy L. and Scheider, Simon and McKenzie, Grant},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.COSIT.2024.8},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-208230},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.COSIT.2024.8},
  annote =	{Keywords: Simplification, isolines, harmony}
}

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DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.GIScience.2021.II.8

Harmonious Simplification of Isolines

Authors: Arthur van Goethem, Wouter Meulemans, Andreas Reimer, and Bettina Speckmann

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 208, 11th International Conference on Geographic Information Science (GIScience 2021) - Part II

Abstract

Current techniques for simplification focus on reducing complexity while maintaining the geometric similarity to the input. For isolines that jointly describe a scalar field, however, we postulate that geometric similarity of each isoline separately is not sufficient. Rather, we need to maintain the harmony between these isolines to make them visually relate and describe the structures of the underlying terrain. Based on principles of manual cartography, we propose an algorithm for simplifying isolines while considering harmony explicitly. Our preliminary visual and quantitative results suggest that our algorithm is effective.

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Arthur van Goethem, Wouter Meulemans, Andreas Reimer, and Bettina Speckmann. Harmonious Simplification of Isolines. In 11th International Conference on Geographic Information Science (GIScience 2021) - Part II. Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 208, pp. 8:1-8:16, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2021)

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@InProceedings{vangoethem_et_al:LIPIcs.GIScience.2021.II.8,
  author =	{van Goethem, Arthur and Meulemans, Wouter and Reimer, Andreas and Speckmann, Bettina},
  title =	{{Harmonious Simplification of Isolines}},
  booktitle =	{11th International Conference on Geographic Information Science (GIScience 2021) - Part II},
  pages =	{8:1--8:16},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-208-2},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2021},
  volume =	{208},
  editor =	{Janowicz, Krzysztof and Verstegen, Judith A.},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.GIScience.2021.II.8},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-147675},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.GIScience.2021.II.8},
  annote =	{Keywords: Simplification, isolines, harmony}
}

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Scalable Harmonious Simplification of Isolines

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