An Automated Approach to Coastline Simplification for Maritime Structures with Collapse Operation

Abstract Maritime structures are significant man-made objects located along coastlines that have drawn considerable attention in maritime navigation, coastal engineering, and urban planning. During the process of map generalization, some maritime structures need to be collapsed. In our study, first, the representation characteristics of these maritime structures are analysed. Second, based on these characteristics, an automated approach of identifying these maritime structures that will potentially be collapsed while simultaneously extracting their partially proportional symbols is developed. Third, based on scale-driven thresholds, the collapse method is automated by selecting extracted partially proportional symbols and is collaborated with coastline simplification. Finally, the proposed approach is tested on various coastlines and maritime structures, and the experimental results demonstrate that our approach is effective for collapsing maritime structures and collaborating with the simplification operator for the automated generalization of coastlines.