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Summary: Automatic Generation of Tourist Maps
Floraine Grabler Maneesh Agrawala Robert W. Sumner Mark Pauly
University of California, Berkeley Applied Geometry Group, ETH Zurich
Figure 1: (left) A digital map of San Francisco from Microsoft Live (www.live.com) marks the location of a few user-chosen landmarks using pushpins. It
is impossible for a tourist to recognize buildings without further visual information. (right) A tourist map generated by our system automatically includes
contextual landmarks in addition to the category of buildings (i.e. restaurants, shopping, etc.) chosen by the user. Moreover the map depicts building facades
so that tourists can more easily identify the buildings.
Abstract
Tourist maps are essential resources for visitors to an unfamiliar
city because they visually highlight landmarks and other points of
interest. Yet, hand-designed maps are static representations that
cannot adapt to the needs and tastes of the individual tourist. In this
paper we present an automated system for designing tourist maps
that selects and highlights the information that is most important
to tourists. Our system determines the salience of map elements
using bottom-up vision-based image analysis and top-down web-
based information extraction techniques. It then generates a map
that emphasizes the most important elements, using a combination
of multiperspective rendering to increase visibility of streets and
landmarks, and cartographic generalization techniques such as sim-
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