Document Type

Technical Report

Publication Date

2019

Publication Title

Proceedings of the 27th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (SIGSPATIAL’19)

Abstract

Libraries are digitizing their collections of maps from all eras, generating increasingly large online collections of historical cartographic resources. Aligning such maps to a modern geographic coordinate system greatly increases their utility. This work presents a method for such automatic georeferencing, matching raster image content to GIS vector coordinate data. Given an approximate initial alignment that has already been projected from a spherical geographic coordinate system to a Cartesian map coordinate system, a probabilistic shape-matching scheme determines an optimized match between the GIS contours and ink in the binarized map image. Us- ing an evaluation set of 20 historical maps from states and regions of the U.S., the method reduces average alignment RMSE by 12%.

Keywords

GIS, georeferencing, historical maps, vector-image alignment

DOI

https://doi.org/10.35482/csc.001.2019

Rights

Licensed to Smith College and distributed CC-BY NC ND under the Smith College Faculty Open Access Policy.

Comments

This technical report is an extended version of the short paper entitled “Deformable Part Models for Automatically Georeferencing Historical Map Images” which was published in Proceedings of the 27th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (SIGSPATIAL’19), 2019.DOI:10.1145/3347146.3359367

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