A DISTRIBUTED POLYGON RETRIEVAL ALGORITHM USING MAPREDUCE

Abstract. The burst of large-scale spatial terrain data due to the proliferation of data acquisition devices like 3D laser scanners poses challenges to spatial data analysis and computation. Among many spatial analyses and computations, polygon retrieval is a fundamental operation which is often performed under real-time constraints. However, existing sequential algorithms fail to meet this demand for larger sizes of terrain data. Motivated by the MapReduce programming model, a well-adopted large-scale parallel data processing technique, we present a MapReduce-based polygon retrieval algorithm designed with the objective of reducing the IO and CPU loads of spatial data processing. By indexing the data based on a quad-tree approach, a significant amount of unneeded data is filtered in the filtering stage and it reduces the IO overhead. The indexed data also facilitates querying the relationship between the terrain data and query area in shorter time. The results of the experiments performed in our Hadoop cluster demonstrate that our algorithm performs significantly better than the existing distributed algorithms.