The cadastral maps as many as about 750,000 map sheets to cover 34,751,000 parcels of land of Korea, are being digitalized. The problem of shrinkage-expansion of the paper cadastral maps has to be resolved for the new digital maps, where the nodes and vertices of the parcel boundaries are represented by coordinates. The photo coordinate refinement techniques, two dimensional projective transformation and local area transformation as in the reseau grid method, were introduced for this distortion correction. Using the fact that original maps drawn on the plane tables in field from 1910 to 1918 have grid lines and have been preserved well, a strategic flow to apply the refinement techniques to the digital maps with the original maps as controls was developed. To accommodate the presence or absence of the original maps and grid lines, and different scales and sizes of the maps, the strategy was implemented by a computer program package. Various distortions and corrections were simulated and errors were evaluated. The RMS errors in the corrected digital maps were allowable, thus, the method developed in this study was to be applicable for the digital cadastral maps.