Breadth first linear quadtrees for water resource management in Geographical Information Systems

A GIS is a valuable tool to provide the information required in managing water reservoirs. When a GIS in raster format is utilized to depict the locations of reservoirs, they may be represented by black pixels in a binary image. A new coding is proposed in this study to construct a linear quadtree. The proposed scheme, a breadth first linear quadtree (BFLQ) coding scheme, emphasizes the reduction of a bit string to encode spatial data. The decomposition discrimination process is designed to have the image data represented in two linear lists. With the usage of both identifier and colour lists, a compact storage is derived to code spatial data on a binary image. Two sets of binary images with various resolution factors are tested in the experiments. A theoretical analysis for the image in the worst case is also derived. Both empirical results and theoretical analysis demonstrate that the proposed BFLQ coding scheme has a better storage space reduction than other methods.