I glossed over the difficulties of finding the centerline of a complex polygon in the last couple of posts, and didn’t realize the disservice until we got to the nitty-gritty of finding the centerline of “bumpy” streams, for which our solution, which is arguably a discretized version of the traditional medial axis, is quite sensitive to noise and “bumpiness”. With a little more googling, my … Continue reading What is the center line of a complex polygon? (cont. 2)

If we try to extract the centerline of a polygon using Voronoi polygons, like in my previous post, it works pretty well for hydrologic cases, like extracting a stream centerline from stream banks, e.g.: We’ll use this to extract flow lines, in order to build out a better hydrologic network, but also use it to update property boundaries based on deed descriptions which may alternately … Continue reading What is the center line of a complex polygon? (cont.)