Simplify Polylines with the Douglas Peucker Algorithm

An algorithm to reduce the number of data points in a polyline

Socret Lee
Towards Data Science
5 min readMay 8, 2021

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I. Motivation

While working on a path tracking app and a document scanning app, I was surprised to find out that both needed some sort of polyline simplification algorithm in their pipeline. The first of which needed the algorithm to…

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