Data matching of building polygons at multiple map scales improved by contextual information and relaxation

The aim of matching spatial data at different map scales is to find corresponding objects at different levels of detail (LODs) that represent the same real-world phenomena. This is a prerequisite for integrating, evaluating and updating spatial data collected and maintained at various scales. However, matching spatial data is not straightforward due to the ambiguities caused by problems like many-to-many correspondence, non-systematic displacement and different LODs between data sets. This paper proposes an approach to matching areal objects (e.g. buildings) based on relaxation labeling techniques widely applied in pattern recognition and computer vision. The underlying idea is to utilize contextual information (quantified by compatibility coefficient) in an iterative process, where the ambiguities are reduced until a consistent matching is achieved. This paper describes (1) a domain-specific extension to previous relaxation schemes and (2) a new compatibility coefficient that exploits relative relationships between areal object pairs in spatial data. Our approach were validated through extensive experiments using building data sets at 1:10k and 1:50k as an example. Our contextual approach showed superior performance against a non-contextual approach in general and especially in ambiguous situations. The proposed approach can also be applied to matching other areal features and/or for a different scale range.