Abstract
Abstract. In contemporary town planning protection of urban landscape is a significant issue. It regards especially those cities, where urban structures are the result of ages of evolution and layering of historical development process. Specific panoramas and other strategic views with historic city dominants can be an important part of the cultural heritage and genius loci. Other hand, protection of such expositions introduces limitations for future based city development. Digital Earth observation techniques creates new possibilities for more accurate urban studies, monitoring of urbanization processes and measuring of city landscape parameters. The paper examines possibilities of application of Lidar data and digital 3D-city models for: a) evaluation of strategic city views, b) mapping landscape absorption limits, and c) determination protection zones, where the urbanization and buildings height should be limited. In reference to this goal, the paper introduces a method of computational analysis of the city landscape called Visual Protection Surface (VPS). The method allows to emulate a virtual surface above the city including protection of a selected strategic views. The surface defines maximum height of buildings in such a way, that no new facility can be seen in any of selected views. The research includes also analyses of the quality of simulations according the form and precision of the input data: airborne Lidar / DSM model and more advanced 3D-city models (incl. semantic of the geometry, like in CityGML format). The outcome can be a support for professional planning of tall building development. Application of VPS method have been prepared by a computer program developed by the authors (C++). Simulations were carried out on an example of the city of Dresden.
Highlights
While using the Digital Surface Model (DSM) and available GIS software (e.g. ArcGis with 3D Analyst or free QGIS with GrassGIS) it is possible to develop a number of analyses of urban areas that can be useful in urban planning (Czyńska, 2014)
The analysis was based on the 3d model of Dresden in the LoD2 CityGML format, digital terrain model DTM and the DSM model based on irregular grid
The analyses provide an overview and may illustrate the application of the Visual Protection Surface method (VPS) method
Summary
There has been an increasing demand for applications which employ 3D models of Earth including natural and urbanized areas, in order to recreate a realistic and immersive virtual environment. The progress in geoinformation research and related development of new techniques enable improvement in modelling of realistic 3D models for cities entirely from remote sensor data captured by an airborne LIDAR scanner, and present a fast and automatic method for the reconstruction of the 3D models (Poullis and You, 2009; Verma et al 2006). While using the Digital Surface Model (DSM) and available GIS software (e.g. ArcGis with 3D Analyst or free QGIS with GrassGIS) it is possible to develop a number of analyses of urban areas that can be useful in urban planning (Czyńska, 2014). The key issue for further development in the field is introducing of CityGML as an open standard for data recording (Kolbe, 2009)
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