A method for measuring geometric information content of area cartographic objects based on discrepancy degree of shape points

In order to improve the comparability between the geometric information content of vector area objects, this paper proposes a method for measuring the geometric information content of area objects based on discrepancy degree of shape points. Firstly, the method selects circles with unique geometric feature as the reference shape for extracting geometric features, and the geometric in-formation carried by each shape point of area objects is represented by the discrepancy degree between the area object and the reference circle at the point position. Secondly, the proposed method measures the geometric information content of area objects from both local and global perspectives. To avoid the subjectivity of assigning feature weights based on empirical experience, the paper uses the relationships between the radii of three reference circles (MIC: Maximum Inscribed Circle, EAC: Equal-area circle, and MCC: Minimum Circumscribed Circle) as adaptive weight parameters for local and global structural geometric information. The amount of geometric information at each shape point is obtained by weighted summation, and the total geometric information content of an area object is the sum of the amount of geometric information of all shape points. To verify the effectiveness and rationality of the proposed method, this paper designs a noise simulation dataset for simply building area objects and an empirical ranking dataset for evaluating the measurement performance of the proposed method. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves a Kendall rank correlation coefficient of 0.88 on the empirical ranking dataset, which is higher than that of the nine existing representative methods. The proposed method is more consistent with human cognition and is highly correlated with the amount and intensity of noise information. Moreover, the proposed method achieves the comparability of geometric information content of area objects and the adaptive determination of geometric feature weights. The proposed method is an effective method for measuring the geometric information quantity of area objects.