Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Automatic label placement
Summary
Automatic label placement, sometimes called text placement or name placement, comprises the computer methods of placing labels automatically on a map or chart. This is related to the typographic design of such labels.
The typical features depicted on a geographic map are line features (e.g. roads), area features (countries, parcels, forests, lakes, etc.), and point features (villages, cities, etc.). In addition to depicting the map's features in a geographically accurate manner, it is of critical importance to place the names that identify these features, in a way that the reader knows instantly which name describes which feature.
Automatic text placement is one of the most difficult, complex, and time-consuming problems in mapmaking and GIS (Geographic Information System). Other kinds of computer-generated graphics – like charts, graphs etc. – require good placement of labels as well, not to mention engineering drawings, and professional programs which produce these drawings and charts, like spreadsheets (e.g. Microsoft Excel) or computational software programs (e.g. Mathematica).
Naively placed labels overlap excessively, resulting in a map that is difficult or even impossible to read. Therefore, a GIS must allow a few possible placements of each label, and often also an option of resizing, rotating, or even removing (suppressing) the label. Then, it selects a set of placements that results in the least overlap, and has other desirable properties. For all but the most trivial setups, the problem is NP-hard.
Rule-based algorithms try to emulate an experienced human cartographer. Over centuries, cartographers have developed the art of mapmaking and label placement. For example, an experienced cartographer repeats road names several times for long roads, instead of placing them once, or in the case of Ocean City depicted by a point very close to the shore, the cartographer would place the label "Ocean City" over the land to emphasize that it is a coastal town.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.