Voronoi-Based Label Placement for Metro Maps

Metro maps with thumbnail photographs serve as common travel guides for providing sufficient information to meet the requirements of travelers in the cities. However, conventional methods attempt to minimize the total distance between stations and labels while maximizing the number of the labels rather than further taking into account the overall balance of the spatial distribution of labels. This paper presents an entropy-based approach for effectively annotating large annotation labels sufficiently close to the metro stations. Our idea is to decompose the entire labeling space intro regions bounded by the metro lines, and then further partition each region into Voronoi cells, each of which is reserved for a station to be annotated. This is accomplished by incorporating a new genetic-based optimization, while the fitness of the decomposition is evaluated by the entropy of the relative coverage ratios of such Voronoi cells. We also include several design examples to demonstrate that the proposed approach successfully distributes large labels around the metro network with minimal user intervention.