| Abstract: | 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. |
