Producing Intermediate Contours from Digitized Contours

Contour lines on existing maps are often the only source of information about the terrain relief. In an effective digital mapping environment, the generation of intermediate contours is one of many essential capabilities. These intermediate contours can be generated in the original units or in some other units. During the digitization process, errors are introduced into the cartographic data, and data manipulation processes may introduce additional errors. A new six-step method is presented here to reduce the data manipulation errors during the process of generating intermediate contours. In our method, the original digitized contours serve not only as a data source, but also as a control on the interpolation process. This process utilizes one- and two-dimensional filters to determine the differences between original and modeled contours. The interpolated contours are adjusted to the original contours thus preserving both general and local shape of the original relief representations. The most frequent application of this method likely will be in the conversion of “foot” contours to “meter” contours.     

Reducing Linear and Perimeter Measurement Errors in Raster-based Data

An important issue in cartography and GIS is determining the appropriate resolution or cell size when converting vector data to raster. The general consensus is to make the cell size as small as possible to resolve geographic features and provide the most accurate estimates of measurements. Finer resolution results in more accurate estimates of polygon area; however, the raster data structure introduces an artifact that causes errors in the estimation of the length of linear features and of the perimeter of polygon features to increase with increasing resolution. Over-estimation as high as 41 percent is theoretically possible and was found to be around 26 percent for representative polygon maps. A method is described that uses a correction coefficient to reduce overestimation error to less than 3 percent.