A Fast and Simple Heuristic for Metro Map Path Simplification

We give a heuristic for simplifying a path defined by a given sequence of points. The heuristic seeks to fit the points with a set of line segments aligned with a limited set of possible directions. Such “schematic path simplification” has application in automatically drawing simplified metro maps f...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inAdvances in Visual Computing pp. 22 - 30
Main Authors Dwyer, Tim, Hurst, Nathan, Merrick, Damian
Format Book Chapter
LanguageEnglish
Published Berlin, Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg
SeriesLecture Notes in Computer Science
Subjects
Adjacent Block
Layout Problem
Line Segment
Priority Queue
Simple Heuristic
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Summary:We give a heuristic for simplifying a path defined by a given sequence of points. The heuristic seeks to fit the points with a set of line segments aligned with a limited set of possible directions. Such “schematic path simplification” has application in automatically drawing simplified metro maps from geographic data. We show that a simple version of our algorithm produces reasonable results against real-world data and runs in linear time with respect to the number of points (assuming a small fixed number of possible directions). We then give some refinements to the algorithm which may improve the quality of the results but which significantly increase the worst-case time complexity.
ISBN:9783540896456
3540896457
ISSN:0302-9743
1611-3349
DOI:10.1007/978-3-540-89646-3_3