TRIANGULAR MESH APPROACH FOR AUTOMATIC REPAIR OF MISSING SURFACES OF LOD2 BUILDING MODELS

3D city models are increasingly being used to represent the complexity of today’s urban areas, as they aid in understanding how different aspects of a city can function. For instance, several municipalities and governmental organisations have constructed their 3D city models for various purposes. These 3D models, which are normally complex and contain semantics information, have typically been used for visualisation and visual analysis purposes. However, most of the available 3D models open datasets contain many geometric and topological errors, e.g., missing surfaces (holes), self-intersecting surfaces, duplicate vertices, etc. These errors prevent the datasets from being used for advanced applications such as 3D spatial analysis which requires valid datasets and topology to calculate its volume, detect surface orientation, area calculation, etc. Therefore, certain repairs must be done before taking these models into actual applications, and hole-filling (of missing surfaces) is an important one among them. Several studies on the topic of automatic repair of the 3D model have been conducted by various researchers, with different approaches have been developed. Thus, this paper describes a triangular mesh approach for automatically repair invalid (missing surfaces) 3D building model (LOD2). The developed approach demonstrates an ability to repair missing surfaces (with holes) in a 3D building model by reconstructing geometries of the holes of the affected model. The repaired model is validated and produced a closed-two manifold model.

Modelling Building Shadows on Rooftop Generating 3D City Model

3D city models enable us to gain a better grasp of how various city components interact with one another. Advances in geosciences now allow for the automatic creation of high-quality, realistic 3D city models. It is not limited to visualization and navigation, however, also for shadow and solar potential analysis. Solar radiation is an example of a 3D GIS tool that is in high demand. The calculation of solar radiation that reaches 3D objects can be simple, but the shadow effect of nearby buildings is a considerably more challenging issue because some facades or roofs are only partially shadowed. The present study is analyzed into two approaches. The first approach is considered as Visualization (client-side) approach to visualize the 3D city models on the website using NodeJS and CesiumJS. The second approach is considered as Analyzation (Server-side) approach to analyze the solar potential using python for faster processing and deeming the future development aspects.

Modelling Buildings in CityGML LOD1: Building Parts, Terrain Intersection Curve and Address Features

3D city models integrate heterogeneous urban data from multiple sources in a unified geospatial representation, combining both semantics and geometry. Although in the last decades, they are predominantly used for visualization, today they are used in a large range of tasks related to exploration, analysis, and management across multiple domains. The complexity of urban processes and the diversity of urban environment bring challenges to the implementation of 3D city models. To address such challenges, this paper presents the development process of a 3D city model of a single neighborhood in Sofia city based on CityGML 2.0 standard. The model represents the buildings in LOD1 with a focus on CityGML features of related to the buildings like building part, terrain intersection curve and address. Similar building models of 18 cities provided as open datasets are explored and compared in order to extract good modeling practices. As a result, workflows for generation of 3D building models in LOD1 are elaborated and improvements in the feature modeling are proposed. Two options of building model are examined: modeling of a building as a single solid and modeling of a building with separate building parts. Finally, the possibilities for visualization of the model in popular platforms such as ArcGIS Pro and Cesium Ion are explored.

INTEGRATION OF DATA OBTAINED BY PHOTOGRAMMETRIC METHODS SUCH AS A TERRESTRIAL LASER SCANNER AND UAV SYSTEM AND USE IN 3D CITY MODELS: THE CASE OF KÖYCEĞİZ CAMPUS

The ever-growing and complex structure of cities has increased the need to include advanced information and communication technologies in management processes. In parallel with this, the concept of smart cities has emerged and the creation and use of three-dimensional (3D) city models have become one of the most important components for tracking cities online. Depending on technological advances; Photogrammetric methods come to the fore in surveying because it offers convenience in terms of cost and time. Among the photogrammetric methods, mobile laser scanning and UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) systems have become very popular. In this study; Necmettin Erbakan University, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities (SBIF), located in Köyceğiz Campus, was chosen as the study area and focused on integrating three-dimensional (3D) models produced by terrestrial and aerial photogrammetry under the theme of smart cities.

Automatic Unfolding of CityGML Buildings to Paper Models

3D city models are mainly viewed on computer screens, but many municipalities also use 3D printing to make urban planning tangible. Since 3D color printing is still comparatively expensive and the colors often fade over time, many of these models are monochrome. Here, color textured paper models offer an inexpensive and under-appreciated alternative. In this paper, a greedy algorithm adapted to CityGML building models is presented, which creates print templates for such paper models. These 2D layouts consist of cut edges and fold edges that bound polygons of a building. The polygons can be textured or left blank depending on the existence of CityGML textures. Glue tabs are attached to cut edges. In addition to the haptic 3D visualization, the quality of the 3D models can sometimes be better assessed on the basis of the print templates than from a perspective projection. The unfolding procedure was applied to parts of the freely available CityGML model of Berlin as well as to parts of models of the cities of Dortmund and Krefeld.

SEMI-AUTOMATIC GENERATION OF AN LOD1 AND LOD2 3D CITY MODEL OF TANAUAN CITY, BATANGAS USING OPENSTREETMAP AND TAAL OPEN LIDAR DATA IN QGIS

3D city models have found purpose beyond simple visualization of space by serving as building blocks of digital twins and smart cities. These are useful to urban areas in the Philippines through diversified applications: urban planning, disaster mitigation, environmental monitoring, and policy making. This study explored the use of free and open-source software to generate an LOD1 and LOD2 3D city model of Tanauan City, Batangas using building footprints from OpenStreetMap and elevation models from Taal Open LiDAR data. The proposed approach consists of GIS-based methods including data pre-processing, building height extraction, roof identification, building reconstruction, and visualization. The study adopted methods from previous studies for building detection and from Zheng et al. (2017) for LOD2 building reconstruction. For LOD1, a decision tree classifier was devised to determine the appropriate height for building extrusion. For LOD2, a model-driven approach using multipatch surfaces was utilized for building reconstruction. The workflow was able to reconstruct 70.66% LOD1 building models and 55.87% LOD2 building models with 44.37% overall accuracy. The RMSE and MAE between the extracted heights from the workflow and from manual digitization has an accuracy lower than 1 m which was within the standards of CityGML. The processing time in test bench 1 and test bench 2 for LOD1 took 00:12:54.5 and 00:09:27.2 while LOD2 took 02:50:29.1 and 01:27:48.2, respectively. The results suggest that the efficient generation of LOD1 and LOD2 3D city models from open data can be achieved in the FOSS environment using less computationally intensive GIS-based algorithms.

MODELLING CHANGES, STAKEHOLDERS AND THEIR RELATIONS IN SEMANTIC 3D CITY MODELS

Urban digital twins have been increasingly adopted by cities worldwide. Digital twins, especially semantic 3D city models as key components, have quickly become a crucial platform for urban monitoring, planning, analyses and visualization. However, as the massive influx of data collected from cities accumulates quickly over time, one major problem arises as how to handle different temporal versions of a virtual city model. Many current city modelling deployments lack the capability for automatic and efficient change detection and often replace older city models completely with newer ones. Another crucial task is then to make sense of the detected changes to provide a deep understanding of the progresses made in the cities. Therefore, this research aims to provide a conceptual framework to better assist change detection and interpretation in virtual city models. Firstly, a detailed hierarchical model of all potential changes in semantic 3D city models is proposed. This includes appearance, semantic, geometric, topological, structural, Level of Detail (LoD), auxiliary and scoped changes. In addition, a conceptual approach to modelling most relevant stakeholders in smart cities is presented. Then, a model - reality graph is used to represent both the different groups of stakeholders and types of changes based on their relative interest and relevance. Finally, the study introduces two mathematical methods to represent the relevance relations between stakeholders and changes, namely the relevance graph and the relevance matrix.

INFERRING ROOF SEMANTICS FOR MORE ACCURATE SOLAR POTENTIAL ASSESSMENT

In guiding the energy transition efforts towards renewable energy sources, 3D city models were shown to be useful tools when assessing the annual solar energy generation potential of urban landscapes. However, the simplified roof geometry included in these 3D city models and the lack of additional semantic information about the buildings’ roof often yield less accurate solar potential evaluations than desirable. In this paper we propose three different methods to infer and store additional information into 3D city models, namely on physical obstacles present on the roof and existing solar panels. Both can be used to increase the accuracy of roof solar panel retrofit potential. These methods are developed and tested on the open datasets available in the Netherlands, specifically AHN3 lidar point-cloud and PDOK aerial photography. However, we believe they can be adapted to different environments as well, based on the available datasets and their precision locally available.

3D CITY MODELS FOR SUPPORTING SIMULATIONS IN CITY DENSIFICATIONS

In order to meet the increasing needs of housing and services in urban areas, cities are densified. When densifying a city, it is important to provide good living conditions while maintaining a low environmental impact. To ensure this, the urban planning process should include simulations of e.g. noise and daylight conditions. In this paper we describe a newly started projected directed towards the need for quality-assured and harmonised input data to the simulations, in the form of 3D city models. The first part of the paper includes the background and research questions of the project and in the second part a tool for daylight simulations on neighbourhood level is introduced, a tool that will be utilized for evaluating the 3D city model design.

INTEGRATION OF 3D POINT CLOUDS WITH SEMANTIC 3D CITY MODELS – PROVIDING SEMANTIC INFORMATION BEYOND CLASSIFICATION

A range of different and increasingly accessible acquisition methods, the possibility for frequent data updates of large areas, and a simple data structure are some of the reasons for the popularity of three-dimensional (3D) point cloud data. While there are multiple techniques for segmenting and classifying point clouds, capabilities of common data formats such as LAS for providing semantic information are mostly limited to assigning points to a certain category (classification). However, several fields of application, such as digital urban twins used for simulations and analyses, require more detailed semantic knowledge. This can be provided by semantic 3D city models containing hierarchically structured semantic and spatial information. Although semantic models are often reconstructed from point clouds, they are usually geometrically less accurate due to generalization processes. First, point cloud data structures / formats are discussed with respect to their semantic capabilities. Then, a new approach for integrating point clouds with semantic 3D city models is presented, consequently combining respective advantages of both data types. In addition to elaborate (and established) semantic concepts for several thematic areas, the new version 3.0 of the international Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standard CityGML also provides a PointCloud module. In this paper a scheme is shown, how CityGML 3.0 can be used to provide semantic structures for point clouds (directly or stored in a separate LAS file). Methods and metrics to automatically assign points to corresponding Level of Detail (LoD)2 or LoD3 models are presented. Subsequently, dataset examples implementing these concepts are provided for download.