A case study of combined text and icon placement
Lars Harrie, Qingnian Zhang, Peter Ringberg · 2005
This paper examines a method of combining text label and icon placement in maps created in real-time. The method is divided into four steps. In the first step candidate positions of the text labels are chosen, and in the second step candidate positions of the icons. The choice of candidate positions do not consider overlaps between labels and icons. The overlaps are resolved in the third step, which is based on a combinatorial optimization technique (simulated annealing). In the fourth and final step labels that overlap can be removed. The main theme of this paper is a study for defining the candidate positions before the combinatorial optimization. A case study is performed where the number of candidate positions varies as well as the selection strategy (random or stratified). The case study indicates that, for our test set up, a large number of randomly selected candidate positions give the worst result.