A New Framework for the Extraction of Contour Lines in Scanned Topographic Maps

3D simulations requested in various applications had led to the development of fast and accurate terrain topography measurement techniques. In this paper, we are presenting a novel framework dedicated to the semiautomatic processing of scanned maps, extracting the contour lines vectors and building a digital elevation model on their basis, fulfilled by a number of stages discussed in detail throughout the work. Despite the good results obtained on a large amount of scanned maps, a completely automatic map processing technique is unrealistic and remains an open problem.