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The Virtual Centimeter World Model

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Cartography from Pole to Pole

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

Abstract

Limitless sensing at ever greater detail, storage at nearly no cost and GPU-enhanced high performance computing have vastly reduced previous limits to the processing and use of digital images in Computer Vision. If citizens collect images of ever improved quality at a centimeter pixel size and with great density, thus high image overlaps, of our environment, if Internet-based image management systems assemble these photographs to meaningful image blocks at quantities in the realm of Exabytes, when 1 million images can be processed per day fully automatically into 3D Geo-information, can we then expect an emergence of very detailed 3D models of our entire urban and rural World? We argue that yes, 3D models of the World are feasible at a detail in the range of centimeters with current technology. Since that technology continues to evolve, the likelihood increases rapidly that such detailed World models will be created. Global aerial orthophotos in the decimeter range are being produced today; centimeter-type pixels are being collected along the entire street network of major cities. Very little is needed to convert such data into the reality of the Virtual Centimeter World Model at pixel-accuracy for a mixed reality experience.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Computer Graphics and Vision, Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria

    Franz Leberl

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  1. Franz Leberl
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Technical University of Dresden, Dresden, Germany

    Manfred Buchroithner

  2. Technical University of Dresden, Dresden, Germany

    Nikolas Prechtel

  3. Institute of Cartography, Dresden, Germany

    Dirk Burghardt

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Leberl, F. (2014). The Virtual Centimeter World Model. In: Buchroithner, M., Prechtel, N., Burghardt, D. (eds) Cartography from Pole to Pole. Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography(). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32618-9_16

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