Enhanced 3D cityscape modeling for enabling the next generation geospatial web

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Over the past four years, the Geospatial Web (GeoWeb) has grown very quickly. The GeoWeb is a powerful technology that allows one to connect various types of web content to a geographic location. With the GeoWeb, non-spatial web information such as text, pictures, videos, sounds, etc.can all be tied to a place. One of the most significant capabilities of the GeoWeb is that it allows one to experience and search the physical world online. Today, 3D GeoWeb browsers such as Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth enables us to virtually travel a number of megacities around the globe with 'fly-through', 'drive-through' and 'walk-through' explorations of 3D cityscape models. 3D cityscape models are virtual representations of the physical urban world and as such are a crucial extension of the GeoWeb that has many potential benefits. Applications include urban management, planning and development; public safety; environmental management; tourism; telecommunications; transportation; navigation; and e-commerce. Given the potential benefits there is an ever increasing demand for photo-realistic 3D cityscape models. However, current methods for efficiently building and updating 3D cityscape models are inadequate and need to be improved dramatically. Today's typical approach is to construct these models using stereo 3D digitization of aerial stereo-images. This manual-centric approach is inefficient and prohibitively time-consuming for building the large-scale 3D city models that are being, and will be, required for use in 3D geobrowsers. Thus, new techniques, methods and strategies are needed to greatly increase the speed and accuracy of 3D cityscape model generation and visualization for use at a massive scale. To address these new and important challenges, the research proposed here focuses on: a) accurate and complete 3D reconstruction of building facades with high visual quality of façade textures; b) hierarchical reconstruction of 3D building rooftops produced according to level-of-detail for dynamic visualization; c) integrating 3D indoor and outdoor building models; and d) photo-realistic 3D reconstruction of trees typical of urban settings.