Salience Indicators for Landmark Extraction at Large Spatial Scales Based on Spatial Analysis Methods

Urban landmarks are frequently used in way-finding and representations of spatial knowledge. However, assessing the salience of urban landmarks is difficult. Moreover, no method exists to rapidly extract urban landmarks from basic geographic information databases. The goal of this paper is to solve these problems from the dual aspects of spatial knowledge representation and public spatial cognition rules. A clear and systematic definition for multiple-scale urban landmarks is proposed, together with a category reference for extracting smalland medium-scale urban landmarks and a model for the large-scale automatic extraction of urban landmarks. In this large-scale automatic urban landmark extraction model, the salience is expressed by two weighted parameters: the check-in totals and local accessibility. The extraction threshold is set according to a predefined number of landmarks to be extracted. Experiments show that the extraction results match the reference data well.