Pattern Recognition of Complex Distributed Ditches

Abstract

The ditch pattern reflects the distribution characteristics of an agricultural drainage system and needs to be detected to enrich the data source before map generalization. Due to several breaks, the connectivity of the ditches is destroyed between ditches and rivers in map representation, making its structure complex. Previous studies have primarily focused on extracting parallel ditches, paying less attention to complex ditches with breaks. The pattern recognition of ditches does not merely involve the extraction of parallel relation. It involves the extraction of different level relations, which is a great challenge. Therefore, this study proposes a novel model to describe the complex structure of ditches. Our work consisted of the following three main contributions: (1) the collinear relation was defined to detect the groups of ditch segments separated by breaks, (2) the detection method of parallel relation was improved throughout the multi-parameter combined constraints, and (3) the main-tributary relation was proposed to build a connection between parallel groups and rivers. The experimental results showed that the proposed method was solved effectively in complex ditch pattern recognition.