ReBankment: displacing embankment lines from roads and rivers with a least squares adjustment

ABSTRACT While the recent progress on automated generalisation helped National Mapping Agencies to derive topographic maps more and more quickly, there are still practical cartographic issues that require attention. For instance, embankments are represented with line symbols showing the slope of the embankment. This paper proposes an automated algorithm called ReBankment that displaces the embankment lines from the roads and rivers that overlap the embankment symbol. ReBankment is based on a triangulation to identify neighbourhoods, and on a least squares adjustment to displace and distort the embankment line while preserving its shape. This paper also proposes how to handle complex cases and scaling issues. ReBankment is tested on real data from a 1:25k scale topographic map.