City Scenes Research Articles

3D Reconstruction and Rendering Models in Urban Architectural Design Using Kalman Filter Correction Algorithm

In a virtual 3D city scene, a 3D building model is a must-have element. A 3D reconstruction and rendering algorithm is described in this paper. Model geometry and texture data are simplified separately using LOD model technology. Half-folded mesh algorithm is used to simplify geometric data, while wavelet algorithm is used to compress texture data. Both methods reduce the amount of data that must be stored as well as the amount of data that must be transmitted over the network. To improve the response time of the original algorithm, a Kalman filter correction algorithm is used to optimize the 3D reconstruction beam adjustment algorithm. In this paper, the experimental scheme is used to assess the method. Experiments show that the algorithm reduces the number of primitives drawn by the system while preserving the important geometric features of the scene’s building model. It can also effectively reduce the workload of drawing 3D scenes, improve computer productivity, and reduce computer hardware requirements. This technique is well suited to rendering large-scale 3D urban scenes.

5G Virtual Reality in the Design and Dissemination of Contemporary Urban Image System under the Background of Big Data

As an important part of the soft power of urban culture, the importance of city image has received widespread attention from academic circles and society. The study of city image communication has become one of the important research directions in the field of communication in recent years. This research mainly discusses the application of 5G virtual reality in the design and dissemination of a contemporary urban image system under the background of big data. This research designs and develops a city image system that models and simulates virtual cities in a three-dimensional scene. The system consists of several different modules, including a data acquisition module, scene construction, and roaming module. The most important data resource formats used by this system are the DXF format and 3DS format, which can be created and acquired using digital stereo images in the data acquisition module. The data import and export module can convert the models in DXF format and 3DS format into Openfligt format models. The model editing and reconstruction module can visually edit and reconstruct the converted model, so that the space and attribute information of the recreated model is stored in the data storage and management system. Finally, a scene roaming module is created, and models are selected from the database to create a 3D city scene and provide interactive roaming information extraction. After the implementation of virtual reality technology, the per capita awareness of urban humanities reached 63.2%. The test results show that because the system integrates the respective advantages of the geographic information system, virtual reality, and database technology, it can better realize the modeling and simulation of digital cities under the conditions of three-dimensional visualization, which is conducive to the spread of urban image.

Utility‐pole Detection Based on Interwoven Column Generation from Terrestrial Mobile Laser Scanner Data

AbstractMobile lidar scanning is one of the recent technologies that is used to map street scenes rapidly. Among street objects, utility‐poles are more critical to energy companies to monitor regularly through time. This paper presents a novel approach to detect utility‐poles from mobile lidar data in complex city scenes. After removing ground points, the scene is gridded into blocks based on a shared‐partitioning algorithm. Next, an interwoven column generation algorithm is used to create columns. Finally, each of these columns is considered to be a utility‐pole or not. The proposed algorithm is tested on two test areas. The algorithm achieved Completeness, Correctness and Quality of 92.8%, 97.5% and 90.6% in Area 1, and 92.8%, 92.2% and 86.1% in Area 2. The total number of utility‐poles in both areas was 265. The algorithm shows promising results in utility‐pole detection in complex city scenes with attached walls.

Nowy Świat to nazwa cyrku. Nowocześni przeglądają się w obrazach Giandomenica Tiepolo

The 18th century Venetian Republic reconfigured the pop-cultural modernity with its collapse. On the sketches and frescoes of Giandomenico Tiepolo, the figures of Commedia dell’Arte banished from the city scene transform the erstwhile carnival into an inkling of the New World, the art of the circus. In the 20th century, authors and philosophers uncover a terrifying prophecy of the collapse of universal values from those visionary works.

“All that we see is seen in perspective”: point of view as word and image

Whereas the fictiveness of narrative perspective is taken for granted in literature, it also emerges as a salient element in the experiences of pictorial art and architecture as part of a viewer’s internal response to their altered views of reality. Whether a visual technique or a narrative one for shaping the way things are seen, perspective assumes that the conditions of seeing an object are flexible and open to mental and material variables in diverse historical media and sites. These range from the cognitively provocative trompe l’œil fresco paintings of seventeenth-century Italy, the typographical headings used as chapter divisions in eighteenth-century British novels, and hand-colored eighteenth-century prints of city scenes made to look three-dimensional through an optical device, to the inscribed stones used in post war Berlin monuments, and an art historian’s recent perspectives on memories of his twentieth-century childhood home. Concentrating on perspective foremost as a medium and conduit for the imagination, Getting Perspective reveals its transhistorical role in word and image as a shaper and maker of imagined worlds.

STATE OF THE ART IN DENSE IMAGE MATCHING COST COMPUTATION FOR HIGH-RESOLUTION SATELLITE STEREO

Abstract. Large-scale Digital Surface Model (DSM) generated with high-resolution satellite images (HRSI) are comparable, cheaper, and more accessible when comparing to Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data and aerial remotely sensed images. Several photogrammetric commercial/open-source software packages are being developed for satellite image-based 3D reconstruction, in which, most of them adopt a modified version of Semi-Global Matching (SGM) algorithm for dense image matching. With the continuous development of matching cost computation methods, the existing methods can be divided into classical (low-level) and learning-based algorithms (non-end-to-end learning and end-to-end learning methods). On Middlebury and KITTI datasets, learning-based algorithms has shown their superiority compared to SGM derived methods. In this context, we assume that matching cost is the key factor of DIM. This paper reviews and evaluates Census Transform, and MC-CNN on a WorldView-3 typical city scene satellite stereo images on the premise that the overall SGM framework remains unchanged, providing a preliminary comparison for academic and industrial. We first compute the cost valume of these two methods, obtains the final DSM after semi-global optimization, and compares their gemetric accuracy with the corresponding LiDAR derived ground truth. We presented our comparison and findings in the experimental section.

Do concerns about COVID-19 impair sustained attention?

The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has considerably heightened health and financial concerns for many individuals. Similar concerns, such as those associated with poverty, impair performance on cognitive control tasks. If ongoing concerns about COVID-19 substantially increase the tendency to mind wander in tasks requiring sustained attention, these worries could degrade performance on a wide range of tasks, leading, for example, to increased traffic accidents, diminished educational achievement, and lower workplace productivity. In two pre-registered experiments, we investigated the degree to which young adults’ concerns about COVID-19 correlated with their ability to sustain attention. Experiment 1 tested mainly European participants during an early phase of the pandemic. After completing a survey probing COVID-related concerns, participants engaged in a continuous performance task (CPT) over two, 4-min blocks, during which they responded to city scenes that occurred 90% of the time and withheld responses to mountain scenes that occurred 10% of the time. Despite large and stable individual differences, performance on the scene CPT did not significantly correlate with the severity of COVID-related concerns obtained from the survey. Experiment 2 tested US participants during a later phase of the pandemic. Once again, CPT performance did not significantly correlate with COVID concerns expressed in a pre-task survey. However, participants who had more task-unrelated thoughts performed more poorly on the CPT. These findings suggest that although COVID-19 increased anxiety in a broad swath of society, young adults are able to hold these concerns in a latent format, minimizing their impact on performance in a demanding sustained attention task.

Bohemian Cultural Scenes and Creative Development of Chinese Cities: An Analysis of 65 Cities Using Cultural Amenity Data

There has been a cultural turn in urban development, as an increasing number of scholars are stressing the importance of culture in urban research and policy agendas. Specifically, the bohemian cultural scene could drive an integral cultural policy approach between the cultural scenes city and the creative city approach. Based on amenities data from 65 major Chinese cities, this paper investigates the relationship between bohemian cultural scenes and creative development of Chinese cities as well as regional differences using tree-based model, ordinary least squares (OLS) and truncated regression, and provides conceptual and quantitative support for a bohemian cultural scenes policy. Factor analysis suggests the bohemian cultural scene in Chinese cities consists of two dimensions: self-expression and charisma. According to regression results, bohemian scenes significantly promote urban creative development; specifically, charisma has a stronger impact on urban creativity than self-expression. There are also significant regional differences: northern and eastern cities should focus on the development of the charismatic dimension, creative subjects should adjust away from prudent industriousness and practice dynamic experimentalism; whereas southern cities should focus on the self-expressive dimension, and continue to promote tolerance, inclusivity and expressive practice. Finally, the bohemian scenes policy demands an integral policy approach sensitive to the existing socioeconomic context: policymakers should incorporate specific amenities into existing qualities of local spaces and cultural consumption to stimulate creative development.

English Narrowboats: From Industrial Revolution to the Urban Housing Problem

The housing scene in major cities is driving people into unconventional real estate options, and London is no exception. As rental and purchase prices have risen, some individuals have turned to houseboats for an affordable option. The waterbodies, that were a main driver of the development of the city, have experienced the consequences of that growth and the degradation that followed. In this paper, the impact of the increase in waterway short-stay and permanent moorings is explored. Several events in the rich history of English canals are discussed, as well as their relevance to the current situation. The needs and main limitations are also considered, as these are putting pressure on the communities, agencies and authorities involved. The constraints, especially spatial, of this type of housing present an interesting challenge for boat designers who need to adapt to the next generation of boaters’ requirements. Additionally, improvement of the facilities and infrastructure is important to protect the rights of all waterway users and the wider public.

Predicting Individual Susceptibility to Visually Induced Motion Sickness by Questionnaire

Background:The introduction of new visual technologies increases the risk of visually induced motion sickness (VIMS). The aim was to evaluate the 6-item Visually Induced Motion Sickness Susceptibility Questionnaire (VIMSSQ; also known as the VIMSSQ-short) and other predictors for individual susceptibility to VIMS.Methods:Healthy participants (10M + 20F), mean age 22.9 (SD 5.0) years, viewed a 360° panoramic city scene projected in the visual equivalent to the situation of rotating about an axis tilted from the vertical. The scene rotated at 0.2 Hz (72° s−1), with a ‘wobble’ produced by superimposed 18° tilt on the rotational axis, with a field of view of 83.5°. Exposure was 10 min or until moderate nausea was reported. Simulator Sickness Questionnaire (SSQ) was the index of VIMS. Predictors/correlates were VIMSSQ, Motion Sickness Susceptibility Questionnaire (MSSQ), migraine (scale), syncope, Social & Work Impact of Dizziness (SWID), sleep quality/disturbance, personality (“Big Five” TIPI), a prior multisensory Stepping-Vection test, and vection during exposure.Results:The VIMSSQ had good scale reliability (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.84) and correlated significantly with the SSQ (r= 0.58). Higher MSSQ, migraine, syncope, and SWID also correlated significantly with SSQ. Other variables had no significant relationships with SSQ. Regression models showed that the VIMSSQ predicted 34% of the individual variation of VIMS, increasing to 56% as MSSQ, migraine, syncope, and SWID were incorporated as additional predictors.Conclusion:The VIMSSQ is a useful adjunct to the MSSQ in predicting VIMS. Other predictors included migraine, syncope, and SWID. No significant relationship was observed between vection and VIMS.

Letting the brush lead: Mark Cousins, film-maker of the floating world

A hill of salt in the Belfast docklands shimmers like an iceberg at sea. A laminated photograph of Sergei Eisenstein drifts in front of a camera as it moves amongst the streets of Mexico City. A grey mist hovers across Stockholm, obscuring the city behind it. These three images are from a sequence of essay films directed by Mark Cousins. In this paper, I discuss the work of Cousins in terms of its floating aesthetics and mobile methodologies. Throughout his films, Cousins's camera drifts through urban spaces, tracing the images and sounds of cityscapes that typically escape us. The films are attentive to the colours infused and refracted through their urban environments, prompting an understanding of cities as studies in fleeting colour, light and luminosity. I engage with Japanese aesthetic theories in order to draw out resonances between the historical art of urbanising Japan and the city scenes of Cousins's films. This paper offers a reflection on the capacity of Cousins's films to evoke an understanding of cities as lively, sensuous and evanescent harbours of a floating world.

Research on Aesthetic Features of Sci-Fi Cities in American Sci-Fi Animations

Science fiction is the experimental field of ideas, and the sci-fi city in animation is also the experimental field of future space. In the era of digital media, the sci-fi city scenes in 3D American sci-fi animation movies have become more exquisite and complex. American science fiction animation insists on building a future space with human civilization trajectory, and renews the aesthetic style of science fiction city with rich imagination, collage city style and powerful digital rendering capabilities. This article focuses on architectural modeling and city space in American 3D animation movies, and studies the sources of architectural inspiration and architectural design principles. And it also explores the new spatial form and new aesthetic characteristics of the science fiction city space under the digital technology.

The Interactive Modeling Method of Virtual City Scene Based on Building Codes

For higher-level requirements of urban planning and management and the recent development of earth and city, it is urgent to establish protocols for the construction of three-dimensional digital city models. However, some problems still exist in the digital technology of the three-dimensional city model, such as insufficient precision of the three-dimensional model, not optimizing the scene and not considering the constraints of building codes. In view of those points, a method to interactively simulate a virtual city scene based on building codes is proposed in this paper. Firstly, some constraint functions are set up to restrict the models to adhere to the building codes, and an improved directional bounding box technique is utilized to solve the problem that geometric objects may intersect in a virtual city scene. The three-dimensional model invocation strategy is designed to convert two-dimensional layouts to a three-dimensional urban scene. A Leap Motion hardware device is used to interactively place the 3D models in a virtual scene. Finally, the design and construction of the three-dimensional scene are completed by using Unity3D. The experiment shows that this method can simulate urban virtual scenes that strictly adhere to building codes in a virtual scene of the city environment, but also provide information and decision-making functions for urban planning and management.

On the Optimization Strategy of EV Charging Station Localization and Charging Piles Density

The penetration rate of electronic vehicles (EVs) has been increasing rapidly in recent years, and the deployment of EV infrastructure has become an increasingly important topic in some solutions of the Internet of Things (IoT). A reasonable balance needs to be struck between the user experience and the deployment cost of charging stations and the number of charging piles. The deployment of EV’s charging station is a challenging problem due to the uneven distribution and mobility of EV. Fortunately, EVs move with a certain regularity in the urban environment. It makes the deployment strategy design of EV charging stations feasible. Therefore, we proposed a deployment strategy of EV charging station based on particle swarm optimization algorithm to determine the charging station localization and number of charging piles. This strategy is designed based on the nonuniform distribution of EV in a city scene map, at the same time, the distribution of EV at different times, which makes the strategy more reasonable. Extensive simulation results further demonstrated that the proposed strategy can significantly outperform the K‐means algorithm in the urban environment.

Junkwraith by Ellinor Richey

Reviewed by: Junkwraith by Ellinor Richey April Spisak Richey, Ellinor Junkwraith; written and illus. by Ellinor Richey. Top Shelf, 2021 [288p] Paper ed. ISBN 9781603095006 $24.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 4-6 In a fit of pique and exhaustion, Florence throws away her ice skates. One would expect she could just come back for them once she calms down, but in this futuristic world, the act of throwing away something she used to love has dire consequences, and a ghost is now attacking her memories as punishment for the abandonment. The junkwraith is formidable, and Florence begins her quest into the Wastelands with almost no assistance or confidence, hardly a worthy opponent for a vengeful spirit. This Swedish graphic novel uses color in brilliant ways, with washed out, muted city scenes echoing the more vibrantly shaded panels when Florence begins to find herself on her quest. The dynamic, unexpected linework reenforces the setting, a futuristic world that is only hinted at in the illustrations and occasional comments. The concept that all the waste we make will haunt us is a compelling one, as is the premise that once-precious, discarded things have the most potential to torture us: this is Toy Story gone horribly wrong. Give this genre-fluid tale to [End Page 102] horror, science fiction, and fantasy buffs, or even realistic fiction readers who don’t mind their family explorations or coming of age stories souped up with some supernatural elements. Copyright © 2021 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Pasear con el paseante: Walter Benjamín, la pregunta por el flâneur y el sujeto del capitalismo

En su libro de los pasajes, Walter Benjamín aporta una serie de reflexiones sobre la figura del Flâneur, palabra francesa con la que se designa a ese personaje que deambula, va a la deriva por las calles, que se pierde en la muchedumbre, figura urbana que observa la ciudad, sus transformaciones. Un sujeto que no se deja seducir por las vitrinas, que hace del acto de caminar; un placer en sí mismo. El funcionamiento capitalista del siglo XXI ha alterado la relación de los sujetos con la ciudad, los escenarios citadinos parecen estar hechos para el consumo, para la compra y venta de productos, es así, como el acto de caminar termina atravesado por las lógicas del uso y la utilidad, hoy se camina con afanes, sin contemplar, sin implicarse con el entorno urbano, la tecnología, la velocidad y el consumismo generan efectos sobre el modo en el que los sujetos se relacionan en las urbes. En el presente artículo, se explora la noción de flâneur en la obra del filósofo Walter Benjamín, su articulación a la obra del poeta Charles Baudelaire, así como la crítica al capitalismo que se encarna en las prácticas de este personaje surgido en los albores de París del siglo XIX, a partir de esta exploración se presentan algunas reflexiones sobre las nuevas formas de relacionarse con espacio vital de la ciudad y las configuraciones de la subjetividad actual. Todo este recorrido finaliza con algunas consideraciones sobre la pregunta: ¿se puede ser flâneur en esta época?

Visual Coverage Path Planning for Urban Environments

View planning for visual coverage is a fundamental robotics problem. Coverage for small objects (e.g. for inspection) or small scale indoor scenes have been studied extensively. However, view planning to cover a large scale urban environment remains challenging. Algorithms that can scale up to the size of such environments while providing performance guarantees are missing. In this letter, we model urban environments as a set of surfaces with k distinct surface normals whose viewing cones must be visited by a robot. We model the resulting coverage problem as a novel variant of Traveling Salesman Problem with Neighborhoods (TSPN). The neighborhoods are defined as cones, which constrain the path coverage quality. We present a polynomial time algorithm which admits an approximation factor of O(k/tan(α) max [L <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">B</sub> , W <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">B</sub> , H <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">B</sub> ]), where α is the maximum viewing angle, and L <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">B</sub> , H <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">B</sub> , W <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">B</sub> are respectively the length, width, and height of a minimum enclosing box of a city scene B. In addition to the analytical upper bounds, we show in simulations that our method outperforms three baseline methods in both trajectory length and run-time. We also demonstrate our method and evaluate the coverage quality of a city containing more than 70 buildings in a photo-realistic rendering software.

Nighttime Cultural Consumption Demands and Suggestions for Improvement in the Old City of Beijing

The Old City of Beijing is the core area that reflects the ancient capital culture. With the development of nighttime economy, nighttime cultural consumption in the Old City is becoming an important way to promote the cultural value of the Old City and show the charm of the ancient capital. In order to promote the upgrading of nighttime cultural consumption and create a better consumption environment in the Old City, this paper conducted online and offline research on nighttime cultural consumption demands in the Old City. Based on the characteristics of night consumers are younger, the survey data mainly came from young people aged 18-40. It reflected the demands of younger groups for nighttime cultural consumption in the Old City. Through the research feedback and problem analysis, the paper put forward suggestions from five aspects to enhance the nighttime cultural consumption in the Old City, including beautifying the night scene of the Old City, cultivating night tour brand, innovating food experience, expanding the publicity channels, and inheriting the classic by relying on modern technology.

The impact of the public good for the tactical urbanism practices on the contemporary urban scene

The urban scene of contemporary cities suffers from modern urban transformations that threaten the structure and shape of urban centers. Thus, it is necessary to show the impact of these practices on the urban reality of the urban scene and the importance of handling these practices to create a more sustainable urban image for cities. The research focuses on the study of the Integrative relationship between the public good and the temporary tactical practices of the city that clearly affect the formulation of the contemporary urban scene. The research reflects the clear impact of urban tactical practices on a part that is consistent with the public good of shaping the urban scene of the modern city in relation to urban sustainability. The research is divided into two main features. The first feature focuses on developing the theoretical framework of the key research terms and highlighting its most important indications. The second feature includes the analysis of a number of local projects to test the research indicators. The final part of the research is the main conclusions and recommendations.

Using unsupervised learning to partition 3D city scenes for distributed building energy microsimulation

Microsimulation is a class of Urban Building Energy Modeling techniques in which energetic interactions between buildings are explicitly resolved. Examples include SUNtool and CitySim+, both of which employ a sophisticated radiosity-based algorithm to solve for radiation exchange. The computational cost of this algorithm increases in proportion to the square of the number of surfaces of which an urban scene is comprised. To simulate large scenes, of the order of 10,000 to 1,000,000 surfaces, it is desirable to divide the scene to distribute the simulation task. However, this partitioning is not trivial as the energy-related interactions create uneven inter-dependencies between computing nodes. To this end, we describe in this paper two approaches ( K-means and Greedy Community Detection algorithms) for partitioning urban scenes, and subsequently performing building energy microsimulation using CitySim+ on a distributed memory High-Performance Computing Cluster. To compare the performance of these partitioning techniques, we propose two measures evaluating the extent to which the obtained clusters exploit data locality. We show that our approach using Greedy Community Detection performs well in terms of exploiting data locality and reducing inter-dependencies among sub-scenes, but at the expense of a higher data preparation cost and algorithm run-time.