A compact random-access representation for urban modeling and rendering

Abstract

We propose a highly memory-efficient representation for modeling and rendering urban buildings composed predominantly of rectangular block structures, which can be used to completely or partially represent most modern buildings. With the proposed representation, the data size required for modeling most buildings is more than two orders of magnitude less than using the conventional mesh representation. In addition, it substantially reduces the dependency on conventional texture maps, which are not space-efficient for defining visual details of building facades. The proposed representation can be stored and transmitted as images and can be rendered directly without any mesh reconstruction. A ray-casting based shader has been developed to render buildings thus represented on the GPU with a high frame rate to support interactive fly-by as well as street-level walk-through. Comparisons with standard geometric representations and recent urban modeling techniques indicate the proposed representation performs well when viewed from a short and long distance.