Consistent Handling of Linear Features in Polyline Simplification

Polyline simplification is one of most thoroughly studied subjects in map generalization. It consists in reducing the number of vertices of a polygonal chain in order to represent them at a smaller scale without unnecessary details. Besides its main application in generalization, it is also considerably employed in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to reduce digital map data for speeding up processing and visualization and to homogenize different data sets in the process of data integration. A variety of techniques has been presented by researchers in different contexts [14, 7, 12, 16].