Byounghyun Yoo, Soonhung Han, Journal of the Korean Association of Geographic Information Studies, 8(1), pp.49-62, 2005.

Abstract:

The VR (virtual reality) simulator such as helicopter simulation needs virtual environment of existing urban area. But the real urban environment keeps changing. We need a modeling method to make use of the GIS data that are updated periodically. The flight simulation needs to visualize not only buildings in near distance but also a large number of buildings in the far distance. We propose a method for modeling urban environment from aerial image and digital map with a comparatively small manual work. Image based modeling is applied to urban model which considers the characteristic of Korean cities. Buildings in the distance can be presented without creating a lot of polygons. Proposed method consists of the pre-processing stage which prepares the model from the GIS data and the modeling stage which makes the virtual urban environment. The virtual urban environment can be modeled with the simple process which utilizes the height map of buildings.

Keywords: aerial image, digital map, displacement map, flight simulation, image-based modeling, urban modeling, virtual environment