An Adaptable Approach for Generating Vector Features from Scanned Historical Thematic Maps Using Image Enhancement and Remote Sensing Techniques in a Geographic Information System

Abstract

Historical maps possess a wealth of information that is, unfortunately, often unreachable by modern mapping applications. While the digitization of historical maps allows the information to be utilized in these applications, it is really, in many cases, the conversion of features (from a raster data type to a vector data type) contained on those maps that enables the information to be used more extensively and easily. This paper highlights the ways the University of Idaho Library enriched a thematic map to become more usable in modern mapping applications. We accomplished this by detailing a work flow within Esri ArcGIS for Desktop that takes advantage of image enhancement, geoprocessing tools, and remote sensing techniques to generate a vector data set from a raster image of a historical map. To a large degree, the general work flow developed can be adapted and utilized on similar thematic maps.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 15 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.