Research on extracting skeleton line of polygon

The Skeleton Line is a very important function to the various automatic transactions for polygon, which is important to map generalization, grid data compression, lettering annotation, and analysis of geographical phenomenon of polygon in GIS etc. The skeleton of area object can be extracted by algorithm based on vector or grid data automatically. Using classical thinning algorithm to extract skeleton Line will lose a few important characteristic points or lines and can´t to keep the relationships with the circumjacent element according to need. This paper proposes an improved algorithm basing on the classical thinning algorithm, which improves the skeleton line of polygon to adapt to concrete applications. A case study shows that the improved algorithm is not only able to reserve the important characteristics of original polygon, but also can keep the relationships with the circumjacent element according to need.