SCTMS: Superpixel based color topographic map segmentation method

•For the first time, we apply superpixel in topographic map segmentation.•We design a suitable superpixel generated method for topographic maps.•Besides color features, we also use appropriate textures features for topographic map segmentation.

Different from natural image, topographic map is a complex manually generated image which has amount of interlaced lines and area features. Because of the frequent intersection and the overlap between geographic elements, the misalignment in scanner and other disturbances like inappropriate preserving, false color, mixed color and color aliasing problems occur in the raster color maps. These problems could cause serious challenges in segmentation process. In this work, we present a color topographic map segmentation method based on superpixel to overcome these problems. Firstly, the finest partition is obtained based on double color-opponent boundary detection method and watershed approach. Then, a strict region merging method is introduced to prevent mis-merging while superpixels generated. This merging method could make the superpixel partition accurately adherent the boundary between different geographic elements. Finally, luminosity, color and texture information are combinative applied to classify the superpixel into different layers based on support vector machine. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms other state-of-art topographic map segmentation approaches.

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