A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Science, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science. Pretoria 1991. / Remote sensing can be used to produce maps of land-cover, but to be of use to the GIS community these maps must first be vectorized in an intelligent manner. Existing algorithms suffer from the defects of being slow, memory intensive and producing vast quantities of very short vectors. Furthermore if these vectors are thinned via standard algorithms, errors are introduced. The process of vectorizing raster maps is subject to major ambiguities. Thus an infinite family of vector maps ccrresponds to each raster map. This dissertation presents an algorithm for converting raster maps in a rapid manner to accurate vector maps with a minimum of vectors. The algorithm converts raster maps to vector maps using local information only, (a two by two neighbourhood). the method is "exact" in the sense that rasterizing the resulting polygons would produce exactly the same raster map, pixel for pixel. The method is "near optimal" in that it produces, in a local sense, that "exacb" vector map having the least number of vectors. The program is built around a home-grown object oriented Programming System (OOPS) for the C programming language. The main features of the OOPS system, (called OopCdaisy), are virtual and static methods, polymorphism, generalized containers, container indices and thorough error checking, The following general purpose objects are implemented with a large number of sophistiated methods :- Stacks, LIFO lists, scannable containers with indices, trees and 2D objects like points, lines etc. / AC2017