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Buildings and Cities: Academic Papers and Projects

• Procedural Modeling of Buildings, Müller, Wonka, et al 2006
  • Builds on their previous papers, describes "CGA shape, a novel shape grammar for the procedural modeling of CG architecture"
  • This is the algorithm used in the impressive commercial product CityEngine, so while it is very kind of them to publish many details of their approach in an academic style, the actual implementation is inaccessible (proprietary)
• Generative Mesh Modeling, Sven Havemann, 2005
  • A massive thesis document (300 pages!) covering the entire field of procedural modelling, which includes a description of the origins and implementation of the Generative Modeling Language, which has many application including buildings and other architectural features.
• Geo Dec (Geospatial Decision Making), 2005-2006
  • Interdisciplinary project at IMSC (USC, Los Angeles) which combines research in rapid 3D model construction from photographs, texture mapping from video fusion, integration of vector and imagery data, depiction of live dynamic data, and 3D user interface.
  • They are funded extend their interactive 3D tools to downtown Los Angeles, to depict the area as it now exists and to support planning of the proposed $1.8 billion redevelopment.
  • the main researches have done mostly 2D work in the past, e.g.:
    • Chen, Knoblock, Shahabi, Chiang, Thakkar, Automatically and Accurately Conflating Orthoimagery and Street Maps, ACM-GIS'04), November 2004
• PBTree – A new progressive and hierarchical representation for network-based navigation in urban environments, J. Royan et al., 2005
  • an interesting paper which proposes an LOD structure for extruded building footprints
  • a city, composed of 2.5D footprints with height, is preprocessed into a compact, hierarchical representation so that they can be progressively streamed over the internet to a realtime city viewer and rendered efficiently
• An Automated Method for Large-Scale, Ground-Based City Model Acquisition, C. Früh & A. Zakhor,  2004
  • Extracting textured building facades from a laser scanner mounted on the side of a vehicle.  Interestingly, the vehicle itself doesn't need tracking, its location can be derived from the laser scanned points.
  • There are lots of issues with trees, empty lots and so forth, for which the authors propose various solutions
• Instant Architecture, Wonka et al. 2003
  • describes an approach called a "split grammar" for procedural representation of buildings
  • The authors implemented their grammar and created an example database consisting of about 250 rules and 40 attributes. The grammar comprises 10 basic shapes, 3 out of which (cuboid, cylinder and prism) have split rules defined.
  • No known public implementation.  Since the description is highly mathematically abstract and lacking description of the rules themselves, this paper seems of little use by itself.
• Automatic Generation of City Models and Related Applications, Y. Takase et al., 2003
  • not exactly academic; gives a nicely illustrated overview of the commercial product MapCube
• Procedural Modeling of Cities (pdf), Y. I. H. Parish, P. Müller: Siggraph 2001
  • applies L-systems to generating street layouts and building geometry
  • can take numerous kinds of real input, such as elevation and water areas
  • evolved into CityEngine (see Procedural Building Implementations)
• A Different Manhattan Project, Chee Yap, Courant Institute, 2001
  • paper describing tools for automatic generation of a large city ("Manhattan like") based on statistical parameters
  • academic paper with 5 co-authors is on their publications page
• Rapid Procedural-Modelling of Architectural Structures (pdf), 2001
  • P.J. Birch, S. P. Browne, et. al., in VAST2001 Proceedings, Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Cultural Heritage
  • good paper on procedural modelling of buildings, with an emphasis on generating large numbers of believable buildings in a particular "style"
  • part of the European CHARISMATIC Project [2000-2002]
• Towards fully automatic generation of city models (pdf), C. Brenner, July 2000
  • main focus is constructing roofs from ground plans, given knowledge from a hi-resolution DSM (elevation points)
  • the do a lot of sophisticated extensions of the straight skeleton algorithm
• The VRVis research center in Vienna, Austria includes a 3D City Modeling project. Research areas:
  • Photorealistic 3D City Model (from existing GIS data)
  • Semi-automatic Georeferencing of Image Sequences
  • Feature based Modeling of Facades
• the Swiss group Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing IGP-ETHZ has done a lot of work on automatic recognition of large number of buildings from a point cloud
  • their 3DGIS Publications include CC-Modeler: A topology generator for 3-D city models, Gruen Armin, Xinhua Wang, 1998 which describes the academic basis for the "CyberCity" modelling system
  • makes some very bold claims, such as a 95% success rate on automatic extraction of building shapes
• the Institute for Photogrammetry at the University of Stuttgart is also active in this area
  • 3D Urban GIS from Laser Altimeter and 2D Map Data (pdf) Norbert Haala, Claus Brenner and Karl-Heinrich Anders, 1998
  • a more modest paper, using 1-meter heightfields and building footprints to "automatically" guess building geometry
• Semi-automatic extraction of buildings based on hybrid adjustment using 3D surface models and management of building data in a TIS, Franz Rottensteiner, Institute of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, Vienna University of Technology, 2001
  • contains a large review of the literature on building extraction
  • gives some details of their ORIENT/ORPHEUS system