Generation of sketch map image and its instructions to support the understanding of geographical information

In this paper, we propose a method of generating a sketch map drawing and its instructions in order to support the route understanding of a human. Both are given from a structured data, called the road network, which is a graph augmented by the attributes of roads and crossings. In generating a sketch map drawing, the pictorial information about the shape and the direction of roads is modified. The sketch map drawing can be generated at any simplification level by controlling a parameter called simpleness. The instructions corresponding to the sketch map are produced by assigning appropriate terms into sentence templates. We verified that favorable results are obtained by this method