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Can Topological Pre-Culling of Faces Improve Rendering Performance of City Models in Google Earth?

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Progress and New Trends in 3D Geoinformation Sciences

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography ((LNGC))

Abstract

3D City Models are becoming more prevalent, and have many applications including city walk-throughs or fly-throughs to show what a new building would look like in situ, or whether a view or light will be blocked by a new structure, flood modeling, satellite and signal modeling. Often, these models are created using a process of extrusion of 2D topographic mapping, resulting in Level of Detail 1 buildings with flat roofs. The models can contain many thousands of polyhedra, which in turn results in performance issues when attempting to visualize such models in virtual earth applications such as Google Earth. This paper presents the results of a series of tests to determine whether using a topological approach to pre-cull hidden Faces from the model can bring about performance improvements. Such an approach could also be said to be one step towards the generalization of such models to support multiple levels of detail.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Note that for simplicity the volumetric object, which would permit the identification of the components of a building and of which buildings share a Face, has been omitted as the work described here focusses on visualisation and on reduction of Face primitives. In general such an object should be added to have a complete 3D model.

  2. 2.

    Open GL is a framework developed over 20 years ago by the Silicon Graphics Lab, and is now maintained by the Khronos Group [0]. It is a standard for writing computer graphics based programs, making use of the computer's graphical processing unit (GPU) which is specialized hardware designed to optimize image display on computer screens.

  3. 3.

    Oracle Spatial at Version 11g supports the following queries in full 3D mode: SDO_ANYINTERACT, SDO_FILTER, SDO_INSIDE (for solid geometries only), SDO_NN and SDO_WITHIN_DISTANCE—http://docs.oracle.com/cd/B28359_01/appdev.111/b28400/sdo_intro.htm#BABIDJJB Accessed 12th January 2012.

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Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the GeoInformation Group for the provision of the UK Map dataset, and in particular Alun Jones for his initial encouragement. Thanks also go to the team at Snowflake Ltd. for the GO Loader software used to load the map data into Oracle Spatial, and to Richard Goodman and Intergraph Corporation for the use of Geomedia Professional to visualize the datasets stored in Oracle.

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  1. Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering, University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT, UK

    Claire Ellul

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  1. Claire Ellul
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Correspondence to Claire Ellul .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. , Geomatics, Université Laval, Ave du Séminaire 1055, Quebec, G1V0A6, Québec, Canada

    Jacynthe Pouliot

  2. , Geomatics, Université Laval, Ave du Séminaire, Quebec, G1V0A6, Québec, Canada

    Sylvie Daniel

  3. , Geomatics, Université Laval, Ave du Séminaire 1055, Quebec, G1V0A6, Québec, Canada

    Frédéric Hubert

  4. , Geomatics, Université Laval, Ave du Séminaire, Quebec, G1V0A6, Québec, Canada

    Alborz Zamyadi

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Ellul, C. (2013). Can Topological Pre-Culling of Faces Improve Rendering Performance of City Models in Google Earth?. In: Pouliot, J., Daniel, S., Hubert, F., Zamyadi, A. (eds) Progress and New Trends in 3D Geoinformation Sciences. Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-29793-9_8

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