A low-cost spatial tool for transforming feature positions of CAD-based topographic mapping

In fact, Computer Aided Design (CAD) offers powerful design tools to produce digital large scale topographic mapping that is considered the backbone for construction projects, urban planning and landscape architecture. Nowadays local agencies in small communities and developing countries are facing some difficulties in map to map transformation and handling discrepancies between the physical reality and represented spatial data due to the need for implementing high cost systems such as GIS and the experienced staff required. Therefore, the require for providing a low-cost tool based on the most common CAD system is very important to guarantee a quality and positional accuracy of features. The main aim of this study is to describe a mathematical relationship to fulfil the coordinate conversion between two different grid references applying two-dimensional conformal polynomial models built on control points and a least squares fitting algorithm. In addition, the automation of this model was performed in the Microsoft Visual Studio environment to calculate polynomial coefficients and convert the positional property of entities in AutoCAD by developing spatial CAD tool. To evaluate the proposed approach the extracted coordinates of check points from the interpolation surface are compared with the known ones.