Representation and reconstruction of map regions

Paper maps need be preserved for their historical importance. These maps are characterized by the presence of texts of different fonts, sizes and orientations on a complex background. These texts are cluttered with criss-cross lines representing boundaries, rivers, roads and railway lines, and many other objects. So, for scanned map image segmentation, representation or vectorization is difficult and make automatic digitization challenging. This paper presents a framework for automatic region segmentation, vectorization and reconstruction of regions within a map. Each region is segmented by analysing histogram of hue, then the contours are extracted, and at last each contour is split into several smaller line/curve segments. Bezier curve fitting is used for representation of smaller curves and finally the whole contour is reconstructed from a minimum number of known points. This way all regions within a map are reconstructed. The approach is tested on a map image dataset of moderate size and the results are encouraging.