Preliminary Analysis of Quality of Contour Lines Using Smoothing Algorithms

Abstract

In this paper several well-known filtering techniques were compared in the purpose of automatic line generalization. The used methods for line simplification are digital first order low-pass filter, Savitzky-Golay (SG) filter and Whittaker filter. Two versions of the algorithm for line feature generalization were tested, from source scale 1:25 000 towards target scale of 1:100 000 and from source scale 1:25 000 towards scale of 1:50 000. Also, GPS data filtering for the target scale 1:50 000 was tested. The first version of the algorithm considers that there are no control data, and the filtering parameter is dictated by the desired accuracy for the target scale. The second version involves control data in the target scale. This means that the optimal value for the filtering parameter is the value for which the difference between input and control data is the smallest. Analysis showed that the SG filter yielded the best results in general. The proposed filters can be considered as a new solution for automated cartographic line simplification.