Linear Feature Simplification Using Wavelets in GIS

Feature Simplification is an essential method for multiple representations of spatial features in GIS. However, spatial features re various, complex and a alrge size. Among spatial features which describe spatial information. linear feature is the msot common. Therefore, an efficient linear feature simplification method is most critical for spatial feature simplification in GIS. This paper propose an original method, by which the problem of linear feature simplification is mapped into the signal processing field. This method avoids conventional geometric computing in existing methods and exploits the advantageous properties of wavelet transform. Experimental results are presented to show that the proposed method outperforms the existing methods and achieves the time complexity of O(n), where n is the number of points of a linear feature. Furthermore, this method is not bound to two-dimension but can be extended to high-dimension space.