Abstract

Millions of historical maps are in digital archives today. For example, the US Geological Survey has created and scanned over 200,000 topographic maps covering a 125-year period. Maps are a form of" evolutionary visual documents" because they display landscape changes over long periods of time and across large areas. Such documents are of tremendous value because they provide a high-resolution window into the past at a continental scale. Unfortunately, without time-intensive manual digitization scanned maps are unusable for research purposes. Map features, such as wetlands and roads, while readable by humans, are only available as images. This interdisciplinary collaborative project involving researchers and their students at University of Southern California and University of Colorado, Boulder will develop a set of open-source technologies and tools that allow users to extract map features from a …

Date

2016

Authors

Craig A Knoblock

Journal

NSF Award Number 1564164. Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering

Volume

15

Issue

1564164

Pages

64164