An Efficient Visualization Method for Polygonal Data with Dynamic Simplification

ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information

Taisheng Chen¹  Menglin Chen¹  Zhimin Jing²  Guonian Lv²  Kun Zhang²  Hong Wang²  Mingguang Wu²  Yangli Han² 

[1] Department of Geographic Information Science, Chuzhou University, Chuzhou 239000, China;Key Laboratory of Virtual Geographic Environment of Ministry of Education, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing 210023, China;

关键词: vector polygon;    level-of-detail rendering;    cartographic simplification;    tessellation;    trapezoid;   

DOI  :  10.3390/ijgi7040138

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Polygonal data often require rendering with symbolization and simplification in geovisualization. A common issue in existing methods is that simplification, symbolization and rendering are addressed separately, causing computational and data redundancies that reduce efficiency, especially when handling large complex polygonal data. Here, we present an efficient polygonal data visualization method by organizing the simplification, tessellation and rendering operations into a single mesh generalization process. First, based on the sweep line method, we propose a topology embedded trapezoidal mesh data structure to organize the tessellated polygons. Second, we introduce horizontal and vertical generalization operations to simplify the trapezoidal meshes. Finally, we define a heuristic testing algorithm to efficiently preserve the topological consistency. The method is tested using three OpenStreetMap datasets and compared with the Douglas Peucker algorithm and the Binary Line Generalization tree-based method. The results show that the proposed method improves the rendering efficiency by a factor of six. Efficiency-sensitive mapping applications such as emergency mapping could benefit from this method, which would significantly improve their visualization performances.

【 授权许可】

Unknown