Reconstruction of orthogonal polygonal lines

Abstract

An orthogonal polygonal line is a line consisting of adjacent straight segments having only two directions orthogonal to each other. Because of noise and vectorization errors, the result of vectorization of such a line may differ from an orthogonal polygonal line. This paper contains the description of an optimal method for the restoration of orthogonal polygonal lines. It is based on the method of restoration of arbitrary ground truth lines from the paper [1]. Specificity of the algorithm suggested in the paper consists of filtering vectorization errors using a priori information about orthogonality of the ground truth contour. The suggested algorithm guarantees that obtained polygonal lines will be orthogonal and have minimal deviations from the ground truth line. The algorithm has a low computational complexity and can be used for restoration of orthogonal polygonal lines with many vertices. It was developed for a raster-to-vector conversion system ArcScan for ArcGIS and can be used for interactive vectorization of orthogonal polygonal lines. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.