Resumen
Building groups with special patterns are common layouts in urban settlement areas, which should be carefully generalized. Typification is considered as an appropriate operator to generalize building groups with grid patterns. As an important operator in building generalization, the purpose of typification is to reduce the number of objects while preserving the original distribution characteristics as much as possible. This study proposes a mesh-based method to typify buildings with grid patterns. Firstly, the pattern is subdivided into perfect grid or grid-like patterns by considering the completeness of the grids. The proposed typification method consists of three steps: (1) generating mesh from the proximity graph of buildings; (2) eliminating triangular meshes; (3) determining the number, positions, and representations of the newly created buildings with the help of the related meshes. The proposed method is modeled as an iterative process to achieve hierarchical typification results, which provides support to the map multiple representation. The experimental results demonstrate that the mesh-based typification method can achieve satisfying results in the perfect grid pattern, as well as the grid-like pattern. The new distribution of the typified buildings preserves the original pattern characteristics.