Towards a comprehensive methodology for automatic vectorization of raster historical maps

Historical maps from different periods of time are very important for many types of research. They can show the development of a place through the time and their use can be profitable in different studies concerning the geographic analysis of terrain, environmental changes and the development of landscape and settlements in a specific area. These spatial changes are many times preserved only through maps that are often available only in analogue form or, in the best case, as scanned raster images. Since the scanning of these maps is not always sufficient for their further analysis, it is useful and practical to have historical maps in vector form and the most important, to have a method to automatically convert the raster historical maps to vector data. The extracted vector data gives researchers and historians the opportunity to detect and determine more easily spatial changes in an area over time and also makes easier the combination and the analysis of historical and modern data in order to highlight in a faster manner the differences between maps dated on various time periods.