Raster image districting and its application to geoinformation

Abstract

We propose a flexible raster image districting framework based on generalized Voronoi diagrams through Euclidean distance transforms. We introduce a three-scan algorithm that segments raster images in O(N) time when N is the number of pixels. The algorithm is capable of handling generators of complex types (point, line and area), Minkowski metrics and different weights. This paper also provides applications of the proposed method in various geoinformation datasets. Illustrated examples demonstrate the usefulness and robustness of our proposed method.