Reliability of Polygonal Boundary of Land Parcel

Abstract

Suppose a land parcel is described by a polygon having as vertices a set of points with coordinates determined by various measurement schemes. Due to measurement errors, however, the vertices are inexact, so that the boundary segments are not wholly reliable: points that appear to be inside, may in fact be outside the true parcel, and points that fall outside the measured parcel may in fact lie within the true parcel. This paper expresses the probability that a given point belongs to a true parcel and addresses simple schemes for approximating that value.