P3DC

Processing of 3D Digital Cities

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 Obiettivo del progetto (Objective)

'Increasing interest in modeling and reconstruction of digital urban scenes may largely be attributed to recent advances in scanning technology and the proliferation of GIS services such as those offered by Microsoft Virtual Earth or Google Earth. We are thus witnessing a strong trend towards reconstruction and visualization of urban scenes based on satellite photography combined with street-level and aerial laser scanners. Nevertheless, scanned point clouds are typically of low quality and exhibit significant missing data (due to occlusion), as well as uneven point density, noise and outliers.

In this project I plan to research techniques for efficient denoising, reconstruction and visualization of 3D urban scenes. This is a pioneering effort towards the goal of generating 3D digital cities from LiDAR scanned data.

My first objective is developing an interactive tool for reconstruction of complex structures and fine details from scanned urban scenes. The interaction paradigm borrows from a sheet layout metaphor where a thin elastic sheet that is laid over some 3D terrain deforms and captures the terrain's structure. This will be achieved through a set of interaction operations, allowing computation of mesh surfaces that will accurately reconstruct complex urban buildings.

In my second objective, I plan to explore and fuse two modalities: 2D photographs and 3D scans of urban buildings. After accurately registering these two modalities using feature correspondence, I plan to use domain specific knowledge to improve and enhance the data mutually.

My third objective is visualization and navigation of 3D digital cities. State-of-the-art navigation systems such as Google Street View and Microsoft Streetside enable users to visit cities virtually by navigating static 2D photos. My goal is to explore ways of navigation through complex 3D environments and their integration with 2D maps by optimizing a set of terms such as speed, view direction, etc.'

Introduzione (Teaser)

A new set of tools based on sophisticated software development is set to improve how architects plan and visualise urban landscapes, offering more advanced 3D simulation technology.

Descrizione progetto (Article)

Laser scanning technology and applications such as Google Earth and StreetView have rapidly advanced the modelling and visualisation of digital architecture and urban design. Specifically, the area of 3D modelling and reconstruction based on satellite imaging, aerial photography and geometrical analysis represents a rising trend as more buildings are being scanned.

Against this backdrop, the EU-funded project 'Processing of 3D digital cities' (P3DC) is developing new software and tools to analyse, model, reconstruct and manipulate 3D urban-scanned scenes.

Furthering the discipline of 3D digitisation, the project team is also considering remote sensing laser technology (LIDAR) used in urban architecture applications. It is working on overcoming limitations in data quality and improving precision through enhanced 'denoising' and image rebuilding where the lack of data and unevenness have affected imaging.

In more specific terms, the project's first of three main objectives involves state-of-the-art interactive reconstruction of complex urban structures. The team is focusing on irregular structures in Europe that are difficult to reconstruct in order to overcome rooftop noise. This involves creating a new tool that reconstructs scanned buildings with registered facades and rooftops using whatever limited data are available.

The project's second objective revolves around photo-scan registration and enhancing urban data, fusing between clearer 2D photographs and less-detailed 3D scans. This is intended to enable robust filtering and up-scaling of 3D data, helping as well to transform photographs into multi-layered depth images.

Of the project's three main objectives, the last addresses navigation and path visualisation in 3D urban scenes. In this context, the project team is working on structural summarisation and abstraction of complex spatial arrangements in architectural drawings, aiming to deepen understanding and perception of 3D maps.

Being able to perfect this technology will help architects and engineers plan better, smarter cities in much more detail than ever before. With the innovative tools developed by P3DC, cityscapes and their components will be much easier to visualise and realise.