Georectification of the historical geological map of Bosnia and Herzegovina

The Geological Overview Map of Bosnia and Herzegovina, at a scale of 1:200,000, is the first comprehensive and detailed geological map meticulously created for the entire country. This paper examines the mathematical and geodetic basis of the map and evaluates its positional accuracy. A method was developed to compute coordinate corrections for arbitrary points based on the differences between the Austro-Hungarian and Yugoslav triangulations, in order to determine the position of any point on the old geological map with respect to the current Bosnian-Herzegovinian state coordinate system. After resolving the issues related to map projection, mathematical and geodetic foundations of the map and coordinate systems, the georectification procedure was applied to the map scan. The results show that the TPS transformation effectively minimizes geometric distortions caused by scanning errors, deformations of the map's base material, and systematic errors from the original map elaboration. After applying the georectification, most remaining positional distortions were attributed to random errors.