Estimation of an unknown cartographic projection and its parameters from the map

Abstract

This article presents a new off-line method for the detection, analysis and determination of an unknown map's projection. Several invariants are used to construct the objective function that describes the relationship between the 0D, 1D, and 2D entities on the analyzed and reference maps.

It is minimized using the Nelder-Mead downhill simplex algorithm. A simplified and computationally cheaper version of the objective function involving only 0D elements is also presented.

Keywords

• digital cartography
• map projection
• simplex method
• Voronoi diagram
• outliers detection
• early maps
• georeferencing
• cartographic heritage
• meta data
• MARC 21
• MapAnalyst