Directional mathematical morphology and reformalized Hough transformation for the analysis of topographic maps

One of the most difficult and important problems encountered in the automatic digitizing of graphical topographic maps is the identification and separate digitizing of different kinds of features. Essentially, in topographic maps, there are two kinds of geometric features: linear features, such as roads and railways that have an arbitrary length, and symbols, which indicate a type of building or area of land usage or even numerical information. These two types of features are extracted and recognized by using methods based on multiangled parallelism (MAP). The MAP operation method performs parallel calculation on directional feature planes. The linear features are extracted using erosion-dilation operations on the directional feature planes, and the symbols are extracted using a reformalized and parallel version of the generalized Hough transformation on the same directional planes, which is called the MAP matching method. The methods have been applied to a 1/25000 scale map.<>