3D City Models for Digital Maps and Navigation

IGG TU Berlin

Download Presentation: 8-3D City Models for Digital Maps and Navigation-Andreas Wichmann-TU Berlin

With the increasing technological advances and the ongoing digitization within society, the way how humans navigate in the real world has significantly changed. For centuries, analog maps were the predominant tool for human navigation. Nowadays, however, they are often replaced by digital maps which can visualize spatial information not only in 2D but also in 3D. These digital maps can be derived from digital 3D city models which represent the Earth’s surface and all related objects on it. Digital 3D building models, for example, are a major component of these 3D city models and have repeatedly shown their capabilities to serve as orientation for customers and to improve the positioning performance of GPS by mitigating multipath and non-line-of-sight effects in urban areas. Therefore, building models are of great interest for digital maps and navigation. In this talk, different approaches for the automatic reconstruction of 3D building models and their limitations will be presented. At first, a close look will be taken at two commonly implemented approaches. Afterward, an automatic reconstruction approach and some of its resulting building models will be presented. In contrast to many other strategies, this approach guarantees the topological correctness of the 3D building models and provides in addition to the geometric information also semantic information if required. The talk will conclude with an outlook on future research.