Software Tools for Modeling Urban Details

This Proposal addresses important problems within the realm of modeling of urban areas for visual simulation, including the modeling of external building geometry, the rapid capture of building appearances, and the modeling of underground structures. Modeling complex building geometry for detailed urban simulation and visualization is expensive and requires trained personnel. We will implement novel methods to efficiently utilize point clouds from ground-based laser scanners to obtain precise building geometry. Simulation and training for urban operation now requires realistic underground structures; we will extend our current capabilities in this area to allow easier and more automated generation of such structures. Building appearances are important visual cues and often determines the believability of a simulation. We will implement innovative techniques to quickly extract image textures from COTS video camera sequences and apply those textures to building models.