Searching for a Compressed Polyline with a Minimum Number of Vertices (Discrete Solution)

Abstract

There are many practical applications that require the simplification of polylines. Some of the goals are to reduce the amount of information, improve processing time, or simplify editing. Simplification is usually done by removing some of the vertices, making the resultant polyline go through a subset of the source polyline vertices. If the resultant polyline is required to pass through original vertices, it often results in extra segments, and all segments are likely to be shifted due to fixed endpoints. Therefore, such an approach does not necessarily produce a new polyline with the minimum number of vertices. Using an algorithm that finds the compressed polyline with the minimum number of vertices reduces the amount of memory required and the postprocessing time. However, even more important, when the resultant polylines are edited by an operator, the polylines with the minimum number of vertices decrease the operator time, which reduces the cost of processing the data. Aviable solution to finding a polyline within a specified tolerance with the minimum number of vertices is described in this paper.