Measurement of similarity for spatial directions between areal objects

Similarity for spatial directions plays an important role in GIS. In this paper, the conventional approaches are analyzed. Based on raster data areal objects, the authors propose two new methods for measuring similarity among spatial directions. One is to measure the similarity among spatial directions based on the features of raster data and the changes of distances between spatial objects, the other is to measure the similarity among spatial directions according to the variation of each raster cell centroid angle. The two methods overcome the complexity of measuring similarity among spatial directions with direction matrix model and solve the limitation of small changes in direction. The two methods are simple and have broader applicability.