Interpretation of colour maps. A combination of automatic and interactive techniques

The article describes a system and technology for the automatic/interactive interpretation of colour maps. Due to the fact that a completely automatic solution is impossible, a combination of automatic and interactive techniques is used. Firstly, colour recognition and separation are performed. For automatic map vectorisation, a special fast scheme is used. To make digitisation more automatic and user friendly, an interactive digitising mode has been developed to extract line-based cartographic objects from vectorised data. The system is used successfully in the digitisation of topographic and other types of map.