Integration of Voxel Models with GeoSOT-3D Grids based on Coordinate Matching

Abstract

Virtual Geographic Environments (VGEs) are proposed as a new generation of geographic analysis tool to contribute to human understanding of the geographic world and assist in solving geographic problems at a deeper level. Aiming at providing virtual scenarios that correspond to the physical world, it is of vital importance to implement geographic modeling and simulations in a proper way. Voxel model is one of widely used raster model for VGEs but generally described in local coordinate system which makes it difficult to be integrated with real geographic locations. To solve this problem, we proposed a method to integrate voxel model with a global grid model GeoSOT so as to establish the correlation between the voxel models and the real geographic locations. The space geometry relationship between voxel and GeoSOT grid was defined and the formula for transforming voxel models into GeoSOT grid was designed. A 3D visualization prototype system was developed based on the proposed method with a 3D building point cloud dataset as modelling objects. Experimental results showed that our method can implement the positioning, meshing expression and visualization of voxel models and verifies the effectiveness of the method proposed. Our method will provide an alternative solution for virtual geographic modeling.