Abstract

Text labels in maps provide valuable geographic information by associating place names with locations. This information from historical maps is especially important since historical maps are very often the only source of past information about the earth. Recognizing the text labels is challenging because heterogeneous raster maps have varying image quality and complex map contents. In addition, the labels within a map do not follow a fixed orientation and can have various font types and sizes. Previous approaches typically handle a specific type of map or require intensive manual work. This paper presents a general approach that requires a small amount of user effort to semi-automatically recognize text labels in heterogeneous raster maps. Our approach exploits a few examples of text areas to extract text pixels and employs cartographic labeling principles to locate individual text labels. Each text label …

Date

January 1, 1970

Authors

Yao-Yi Chiang, Craig A Knoblock

Journal

GeoInformatica

Volume

19

Pages

1-27

Publisher

Springer US