Searching for a Compressed Polyline with a Minimum Number of Vertices

Abstract

There are many practical applications that require simplification of polylines. Some of the goals are to reduce the amount of information necessary to store, improve processing time, or simplify editing. The simplification is usually done by removing some of the vertices, making the resultant polyline go through a subset of the source polyline vertices. However, such approaches do not necessarily produce a new polyline with the minimum number of vertices. The approximate solution to find a polyline, within a specified tolerance, with the minimum number of vertices is described in this paper.