A UNIFIED APPROACH FOR 3D GENERALIZATION OF BUILDING MODELS IN CITYGML

Task-specific applications demand abstractions (generalized) 3D scenes of 3D models to be used for visualization and analysis purposes. Therefore, lower LoDs (level-of-details) from higher LoDs need to be made available to these applications. A unified generalization framework is proposed to derive multiple LoDs (LoD3-LoD1) taking both semantics and geometric aspects of 3D buildings modelled in CityGML (City Geography Markup Language) into account. For this purpose, interior structures of 3D objects at LoD4 are removed to derive LoD3 and openings (door, windows) are removed from LoD3 to derive LoD2. Remaining parts such as outer installations and walls are projected onto the ground and simplified based on CityGML generalization specifications. Algorithms for simplification with the aim to derive LoD1 from LoD2 are implemented and tested on a number of buildings of Putrajaya city, Malaysia. The experiments shows that elimination of important part (s) or merging could be avoided by applying semantic-based removal of objects at different LoDs.