Drawing Road Networks with Mental Maps Shih-Syun Lin Chao-Hung Lin Yan-Jhang Hu Tong-Yee Lee *accepted to appear in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics*
Map generation by using the proposed method. Top: artist-designed map (left) and mental map (right); bottom: original road network of London (left) and our result (right).
Abstract	Tourist and destination maps are thematic maps designed to represent specific themes in maps. The road network topologies in these maps are generally more important than the geometric accuracy of roads. A road network warping method is proposed to facilitate map generation and improve theme representation in maps. The basic idea is deforming a road network to meet a user-specified mental map while an optimization process is performed to propagate distortions originating from road network warping. To generate a map, the proposed method includes algorithms for estimating road significance and for deforming a road network according to various geometric and aesthetic constraints. The proposed method can produce an iconic mark of a theme from a road network and meet a user-specified mental map. Therefore, the resulting map can serve as a tourist or destination map that not only provides visual aids for route planning and navigation tasks, but also visually emphasizes the presentation of a theme in a map for the purpose of advertising. In the experiments, the demonstrations of map generations show that our method enables map generation systems to generate deformed tourist and destination maps efficiently.
Expremental Results	Results of tourist maps. The representative iconic marks are constructed from the road networks of the tourist attractions by using our method. Thereafter, the iconic marks are colored manually in the postprocess. Top: map of New Delhi, India, which is featured with birds. Bottom: map of Chengdu, China, which is featured with pandas. The user-defined geometric constraints are shown at the middle.
URL	Our paper can be downloaded from [Link]. Our demo video can be downloaded from [Link]. Our supplemental results can be downloaded from [Link]. In addition, all tested maps are downloaded from the OpenStreetMap.