PBTree - A New Progressive and Hierarchical Representation for Network-Based Navigation in Urban Environments

This paper describes a novel progressive and hierarchical representation for densely built urban areas. It aims at navigating through huge urban environments with network-based client-sever systems. Thanks to this method, navigation is no longer limited to walkthrough, but allows to fly over the city. This can be achieved through a set of dedicated algorithms allowing the decomposition of city into a multi-resolution representation. The method efficiently exploits the fact that automated modeling technologies of urban scene are generally based on the processing of 2D data (video, photographs, cadastral map, ...), to model 2D 1 2 data (building footprint, height, altitude, ...) which turns out to be more compact. From this pre-computed representation of buildings, a server can progressively send the perceptible details to the client for all the regions visible from a given viewpoint.