A three-step strategy for generalization of 3D building models based on CityGML specifications

Abstract

3D building models of the world exhibit multi-scale properties. Different level-of-details (LoDs) are important for different applications. Therefore, generation of multi-scale representation of 3D building models to fulfill the demands of these applications is a generalization problem. In order to generalize 3D buildings, different pieces of information need to be preserved or removed to restrict the amount of data represented on a certain LoD. In this work, a three-step strategy based on simplification, aggregation and reconstruction of generalized buildings represented in City Geography Markup Language (CityGML) is proposed. The minimum length of edges (threshold value) for removal of amount of data is restricted to generalization specifications of CityGML characterized by differing accuracies and minimal dimensions of objects for each LoD. The main part of this paper is simplification of ground plans. For this purpose, a new approach is proposed to restrict number of edges, curves, and corners of ground plan of 3D building model on a certain LoD. Algorithms for simplification with the aim to derive LoD1 from exterior shells of buildings at LoD3 are implemented and tested on a number of buildings of Putrajaya city. The experiments showed that length of edge as threshold value is directly proportional to the size of generalized models.