Graphics Tools for the Generation of Large Scale Urban Scenes

The acquisition of 3D city and landscape models has been a topic of major interest within the photogrammetric community and a number of algorithms became available both for the automatic and semiautomatic data collection. Usually, these 3D models are used for visualisation in order to generate realistic scenes and animations e.g. for planning and navigation purposes. Such real-time visualisations of artificial or real-word scenes are one of the main goals in computer graphics. Due to the rapid developments in that field, realistic visualisations are feasible even for complex and area covering 3D datasets and are integrated in an increasing number of applications. However, the benefit of applying computer graphics tools within photogrammetric data processing is not limited to the visualisation and presentation of 3D geodata. As it will be demonstrated within the paper, also photogrammetric data collection can take considerable advantage of a direct integration of these tools for the generation of large scale urban scenes.