Morphing polygonal lines : a step towards continuous generalization

We study the problem of morphing between two polylines that represent a geographical feature generalized at two different scales. Some cartographical generalizations are not handled well by traditional morphing algorithms, e.g., when three consecutive bends in a river or road are generalized to two bends at a smaller scale. We attempt to handle such cases by modeling the problem as an optimal matching between characteristic parts of each polyline. A dynamic programming algorithm is presented that solves the matching problem in O(nm) time, where n and m are the respective number of characteristic parts of the two polylines. We also show the results of applying this algorithm on real road data