Abstract
Abstract. Singapore, branded as a “City in a Garden”, has a long standing commitment to green the nation, one which has resulted in trees becoming an integral component of the urban environment. Similarly for its digital twin, Virtual Singapore, we undertake the research to automate the population of this virtual city with semantically and biologically representative trees in a CityGML (City Geography Markup Language) format. This paper presents our framework of modeling trees for Virtual Singapore, showcasing an array of methodologies in data acquisition of light detection and ranging (LiDAR) and satellite images, tree extraction and quantification, and 3D tree modeling at LODs (level of details) 1, 2 and 3. The paper will also highlight challenges and chosen methodologies along with the preliminary results of this framework.
Highlights
1.1 Background Singapore is world-renowned as a ”City in a Garden” (National Parks Board, 2016, Neo et al, 2012) owing to decades of dedication to greening the city
light detection and ranging (LiDAR) scans (ALS and mobile LiDAR scanning (MLS)) and airborne imagery were acquired (Soon and Khoo, 2017) and geo-referenced to the SVY21 Coordinate system with orthometric height based on Singapore Height Datum:
airborne LiDAR scanning (ALS) data over the entire Singapore were collected in April 2014 using an Optech ALTM Pegasus with up to 4 range measurements, including 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and last returns
Summary
1.1 Background Singapore is world-renowned as a ”City in a Garden” (National Parks Board, 2016, Neo et al, 2012) owing to decades of dedication to greening the city. Interwoven between buildings and other urban structures are an estimated 1.5 million trees spread over more than 1000 species in public parks, on state lands, and along the roads (Chew, 2015, Toh, 2018) which are often oversimplified, under-represented, or completely left out in Virtual Singapore. It is exactly due to these differences of species and density that they are planted for creating a variety of experiences within the city. Modeling these differences will enable various environmental or urban analysis and studies to factor in vegetation, but the efficient and accurate creation and maintenance of these models in any virtual city are significant hurdles to overcome. Tree models need to be dynamically generated for scalability and ease of maintenance, yet representative of the actual tree on the ground
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