An Automated Approach to Coastline Simplification for Maritime Structures with Collapse Operation

Abstract

Maritime structures are significant man-made objects located along coastlines that have drawn considerable attention in maritime navigation, coastal engineering, and urban planning. During the process of map generalization, some maritime structures need to be collapsed. In our study, first, the representation characteristics of these maritime structures are analysed. Second, based on these characteristics, an automated approach of identifying these maritime structures that will potentially be collapsed while simultaneously extracting their partially proportional symbols is developed. Third, based on scale-driven thresholds, the collapse method is automated by selecting extracted partially proportional symbols and is collaborated with coastline simplification. Finally, the proposed approach is tested on various coastlines and maritime structures, and the experimental results demonstrate that our approach is effective for collapsing maritime structures and collaborating with the simplification operator for the automated generalization of coastlines.

Keywords:

• Coastline simplification
• collapse
• map generalization
• maritime structures

Acknowledgements

Special thanks are extended to colleagues and reviewers for their constructive comments and valuable suggestions that substantially improved our manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflicts of interest are reported by the authors.

Authors’ contributions

Du and Wu conceived of the proposed method and wrote this manuscript. Concrete algorithms were designed and implemented by Du and Xing. Li helped Du estimate the proposed approach, and Gong helped Du test the applicability of this approach and revised this manuscript.

Data availability statement

Some or all data, models, or code generated or used during the study are available from the corresponding author by request. The utilized OSM data can be downloaded from https://www.openstreetmap.org/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Basic Research Program of China under Grant [number 613317].