Automatically generating large urban environments based on the footprint data of buildings

This paper focuses on the generation of three dimensional models of large urban/suburban environments. Previous work on the reconstruction of particular environments is based on multiple overlapping aerial or street level images. Unfortunately these approaches do not extend well to large environments. The main reasons for this are that they require expensive high-resolution aerial images and a labour intensive modelling or data capture procedure. Consequently methods have been developed to generate large urban environments based on environmental data such as elevation data or building footprints. This permits the model to be based on actual data for the area being modelled and at a cost far less than that of aerial images. By reducing the data given to the model generation procedure various parameters are undetermined. These include roof style and textured appearance. This paper focuses on the use of building footprint information to construct a three dimensional model. It uses LIDAR data to give the buildings a height value and assigns them a roof using new techniques for roof modelling.