Generalized Buffering Algorithm

Abstract

The existing buffers algorithms cannot effectively to meet the demands of high accuracy of buffer analysis in practice although many efforts have been made in the past 60 years. A generalized buffering algorithm (GBA) is presented, which considers the geometric distance and the attribute characteristics of all instances within buffer zone. The proposed algorithm includes three major steps: (1) select and initialize target instance; (2) determine buffer boundary points through mining homogeneous pattern; (3) “smoothly” connect buffer boundary points to generate the generalized buffer zone. The details for the generations of the generalized point buffer (GPIB) zone, the generalized line buffer (GLB) zone, and the generalized polygon buffer (GPLB) zone are discussed. Two dataset are used to validate the performances of the proposed GBA. Six parameters are applied as indexes to evaluate the proposed algorithm. The experimental results discovered that (1) the GBA is close to the tradition buffering algorithm (TBA) when the angle increment ( $\Delta \varphi$ ) in GPIB, line increment ( $\Delta L$ ) in GLB, and arc length increment ( $\Delta S$ ) in GPLB approach to zero, respectively; (2) the proposed GBA can accurately reflect the real situation of the buffering zone, and improve the deficiency and accuracy of TBA in real application.

Keywords

• Buffering zone
• data mining
• geographic information science
• homogeneous pattern
• spatial analysis