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Historical map polygon and feature extractor

Published: 05 November 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Polygon and attribute data extraction from historical maps such as US insurance atlases from the 19th and early 20th centuries has so far been a manual task. The New York Public Library (NYPL) currently relies on staff and volunteer work to manually extract polygons and other attribute data from its collection to create new public data sets for the study of urban history. This is a time-intensive task requiring up to several minutes to trace a shapefile and transcribe attributes for a single building. In this paper we propose an approach to automatically extract such attribute data from historical maps. The approach makes use of multiple image processing and statistics utilities to produce desirable results in a fraction of the time required to do by hand.
On average, a shapefile for an atlas sheet is generated in ~11.4 minutes for a total of 23.5 hours of processing time for a whole atlas that contains ~55,000 polygons; contrast this time frame to NYPL's current manual process that has taken three years to extract about 170,000 polygons across four New York City street atlases.
Even with some error rate in the proposed approach, the most cumbersome, time-intensive work (manual polygon drawing) has been reduced to a fraction of its original scope. This new workflow has promising implications for historical GIS.

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Cited By

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  • (2023)Exploiting Polygon Metadata to Understand Raster Maps - Accurate Polygonal Feature ExtractionProceedings of the 31st ACM International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems10.1145/3589132.3625659(1-12)Online publication date: 13-Nov-2023
  • (2023)A Holistic Workflow for Semi-automated Object Extraction from Large-Scale Historical MapsEin holistischer Workflow zur semi-automatisierten Objektextraktion aus großmaßstäbigen historischen KartenKN - Journal of Cartography and Geographic Information10.1007/s42489-023-00131-z73:1(3-18)Online publication date: 10-Feb-2023
  • (2022)Reconstructing historical 3D city modelsUrban Informatics10.1007/s44212-022-00011-31:1Online publication date: 21-Oct-2022
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  1. Historical map polygon and feature extractor

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    MapInteract '13: Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on MapInteraction
    November 2013
    97 pages
    ISBN:9781450325363
    DOI:10.1145/2534931
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Published: 05 November 2013

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    Author Tags

    1. alpha shapes
    2. attribute data extraction
    3. map image tracing

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    MapInteract '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 17 of 20 submissions, 85%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 17 of 20 submissions, 85%

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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2023)Exploiting Polygon Metadata to Understand Raster Maps - Accurate Polygonal Feature ExtractionProceedings of the 31st ACM International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems10.1145/3589132.3625659(1-12)Online publication date: 13-Nov-2023
    • (2023)A Holistic Workflow for Semi-automated Object Extraction from Large-Scale Historical MapsEin holistischer Workflow zur semi-automatisierten Objektextraktion aus großmaßstäbigen historischen KartenKN - Journal of Cartography and Geographic Information10.1007/s42489-023-00131-z73:1(3-18)Online publication date: 10-Feb-2023
    • (2022)Reconstructing historical 3D city modelsUrban Informatics10.1007/s44212-022-00011-31:1Online publication date: 21-Oct-2022
    • (2021)Historical Cartographic Information for Cultural Heritage Applications in a Semantic FrameworkCartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization10.3138/cart-2021-000256:4(255-266)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2021
    • (2020)Algorithmic Improvement of Crowdsourced DataProceedings of the 28th International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems10.1145/3397536.3422260(433-436)Online publication date: 3-Nov-2020
    • (2020)Automated Extraction of Human Settlement Patterns From Historical Topographic Map Series Using Weakly Supervised Convolutional Neural NetworksIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2019.29632138(6978-6996)Online publication date: 2020
    • (2019)Kartta LabsProceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on AI for Geographic Knowledge Discovery10.1145/3356471.3365236(48-51)Online publication date: 5-Nov-2019
    • (2019)Creating Structured, Linked Geographic Data from Historical Maps: Challenges and TrendsUsing Historical Maps in Scientific Studies10.1007/978-3-319-66908-3_3(37-63)Online publication date: 18-Nov-2019
    • (2018)Putting User Reputation on the MapProceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Geospatial Humanities10.1145/3282933.3282937(1-6)Online publication date: 6-Nov-2018
    • (2017)Algorithmically-Guided User InteractionProceedings of the 25th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems10.1145/3139958.3140032(1-4)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2017
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