A Collaborative Displacement Approach for Spatial Conflicts in Urban Building Map Generalization

Spatial conflicts can remain unresolved during map generalization if only displacement is used, especially for urban building maps. To solve all possible spatial conflicts during urban building map generalization, we propose a collaborative displacement method, combining aggregation, elimination, and constrained reshape. After applying an improved vector field-based displacement for solution of initial conflicts, two types of sequential conflicts are detected and evaluated to identify additional displacement solutions based on a trial and error strategy. If no displacement solution is available, aggregation, elimination, or constrained reshape are selected and applied for the unsolved sequential conflicts based on cartographic rules. For a more reasonable generalization result, an improved constrained reshape approach is also introduced for buildings in conflicts along roads. Two data sets with scales of 1:5000 and 1:25 000 for urban building map were selected to validate this approach. The results indicate that it is reasonable and feasible to solve all defined spatial conflicts in urban building map generalization using our proposed method.