Photogrammetry News

Photogrammetry News

3D City Modeling

3D city modeling is becoming an increasingly important area of research and development with a wide array of applications including urban visualization, planning and navigation, infrastructure design and development, community awareness, defense and homeland security, emergency response, and resource development. Important research problems arise from data capture and processing, 3D model construction, automatic feature extraction, interactive navigation, data streaming, compression, and many more.

3D models of cities are a critical area for CAD/GIS/games integration, and offer significant benefits to urban planners and developers, especially related to issues such as pollution, heating, lighting, noise abatement and crime. Future city design will need to take a more holistic approach to these issues rather than simply focusing on isolated buildings or even neighborhoods. This demands broader and more flexible sharing of information across multiple jurisdictions and disciplines. Recently, 3D city models have been incorporated as “eye candy” in both Microsoft Bing and Google Earth/Maps, and one can anticipate greater use of these models than they are already now, such as on mobile devices.