Aligning archive maps and extracting footprints for analysis of historic urban environments

Abstract

a b s t r a c tArchive cartography and archaeologist's sketches are invaluable resources when analysing a historic town or city. A virtual reconstruction of a city provides the user with the ability to navigate and explore an environment which no longer exists to obtain better insight into its design and purpose. However, the process of reconstructing the city from maps depicting features such as building footprints and roads can be labour intensive. In this paper we present techniques to aid in the semi-automatic extraction of building footprints from digital images of archive maps and sketches. Archive maps often exhibit problems in the form of inaccuracies and inconsistencies in scale which can lead to incorrect reconstructions. By aligning archive maps to accurate modern vector data one may reduce these problems. Furthermore, the efficiency of the footprint extraction methods may be improved by aligning either modern vector data or previously extracted footprints, since common elements can be identified between maps of differing time periods and only the difference between the two needs to be extracted. An evaluation of two alignment approaches is presented: using a linear affine transformation and a set of piecewise linear affine transformations.

Changing urban form in a shrinking city

“…Maps and sketches of building footprints have long provided useful information for architecture and planning (Laycock et al., 2011). Footprint data can support study on interactions between urban construction and urban ecosystems and the relationship between building scale and energy efficiency as well as green building and neighborhood design (Wang et al., 2006).…”

“…Building footprint data can demonstrate changes in towns and cities over time as well as the impact of human-dominated processes on biodiversity and ecosystem processes (Laycock et al., 2011). However, building footprint data have been used less often to examine urban shrinkage.…”

Automatic Road Extraction from Historical Maps Using Deep Learning Techniques: A Regional Case Study of Turkey in a German World War II Map

“…This information could be integrated into geographic information systems (GISs) to be used in various applications such as detailed historical analysis, urban and city planning, and disaster management studies. Large collections of historical map and plan archives could be used to create information on the changes which occurred in many historic towns and cities across the world [4,5].…”

“…Manual digitization has still been widely used for reliable labeled data preparation for use in the learning process of artificial intelligence-based approaches. It took Vectorization of historical maps and aerial photographs has been conducted mainly through the on-screen digitization technique, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive [4,8,9]. Manual digitization has still been widely used for reliable labeled data preparation for use in the learning process of artificial intelligence-based approaches.…”

Lost Waterways: Clues From Digitized Historical Maps of Manila and Other Philippines Cities

“…Overlaying historical maps with present maps has been done by other groups for different purposes such as historic visualization (Shimizu, Fuse, 2003), urban change analysis (San-Antonio-G ómez et al, 2014;Laycock et al, 2011), and understanding environmental issues (Haase et al, 2007;Timar et al, 2008). Our work extends the purpose to disaster mitigation by providing a map of potential flooding/liquefaction hazards down to the street level.…”