Registration of maps using deformable contours in Global Atlas

Global-Atlas is a geographical search engine for maps, aerial and satellite pictures that are available on the World Wide Web. Users express their queries graphically by drawing the region of interest on a map. Indeed, documents in Global-Atlas index the Web documents according to the geographical region they are representing. However, the raster maps, commonly available on the Web in the form of GIF or JPEG images, come in a variety of unspecified coordinate systems and projections. Indexing these maps entails calibrating them to a single reference coordinate system. In this paper, we study the use of Generalised Active Contour Model (G-Snake) to extract, model, and match coastlines and other remarkable contours as the basis of an improved semiautomatic map registration model (GDT model) for Global Atlas