Building Footprint Aggregation with Preservation of Edge Orientations

The aggregation of building footprints is a key task of cartographic generalization, which is an important topic in geoinformation science. It has been approached from various angles, ranging from heuristics and optimization algorithms to machine learning. Given a set of input polygons that represent the building footprints, the task is to generate a set of polygons that provide a coarser representation of the input. The problem has applications in the visualization of settlement areas in small-scale maps, as well as settlement classification and analysis. A popular solution approach is to construct a subdivision of the plane and then build a solution by selecting faces from the subdivision. Often, a triangulation is used for the subdivision. However, this can cause the orientations of the boundary edges in the solution to differ drastically from the input polygons, which leads to a loss of information about the underlying settlement structure. We explore an alternative method that constructs the subdivision by extending the input building edges, thereby automatically preserving their orientations. To make the approach scalable to large instances without substantially decreasing the solution quality, we propose different methods of reducing the complexity of the subdivision. Our experimental evaluation on real-world data shows that our method is able to aggregate towns containing up to ≈ 10 000 building footprints while preserving input edge orientations much better than state-of-the-art methods.