Optimal Compression of a Polyline While Aligning to Preferred Directions

Simplification of polylines is used in many practical applications. However, in some applications, there is an expectation of having straight segments or even the ends of circular arcs of the resultant polyline being aligned to some preferred directions. For example, building footprints are usually aligned to the direction of streets and have orthogonal shapes. This paper extends the compression algorithms [1] to support a user-defined set of preferred directions. This paper also looks into using a graphics processing unit framework to improve the performance of the algorithm.