3D Cities Rendering and Visualisation: a Web-Based Solution Noura El Haje, Jean Pierre Jessel, Véronique Gaildrat, Cédric Sanza
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3D Cities Rendering and Visualisation: A Web-Based Solution Noura El Haje, Jean Pierre Jessel, Véronique Gaildrat, Cédric Sanza To cite this version: Noura El Haje, Jean Pierre Jessel, Véronique Gaildrat, Cédric Sanza. 3D Cities Rendering and Visual- isation: A Web-Based Solution. Eurographics Workshop on Urban Data Modelling and Visualisation (UDMV 2016), Dec 2016, Liege, Belgium. pp. 95-100. hal-01787406 HAL Id: hal-01787406 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01787406 Submitted on 7 May 2018 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Open Archive TOULOUSE Archive Ouverte ( OATAO ) OATAO is an open access repository that collects the work of Toulouse researchers and makes it freely available over the web where possible. This is an author-deposited version published in : http://oatao.univ-toulouse.fr/ Eprints ID : 18984 The contribution was presented at UDMV 2016 To link to this article URL : http://dx.doi.org/10.2312/udmv.20161426 To cite this version : El Haje, Noura and Jessel, Jean-Pierre and Gaildrat, Véronique and Sanza, Cédric 3D Cities Rendering and Visualisation: A Web- Based Solution. (2016) In: Eurographics Workshop on Urban Data Modelling and Visualisation (UDMV 2016), 8 December 2016 - 8 December 2016 (Liege, Belgium). Any corresponde nce concerning this service should be sent to the repository administrator: staff -oatao@listes -diff.inp -toulouse.fr 3D Cities Rendering and Visualisation: A Web-Based Solution N. El Haje J.P. Jessel V. Gaildrat and C. Sanza Institut de Recherche en Informatique, Toulouse, France Abstract 3D cities reconstruction and visualisation have always been a challenging area. Many software have been developed for con- structing, editing and visualising 3D virtual cities. These software that allow the semi-automatic generation of virtual cities whether destined for visualisation, simulation and games have largely reduced the cost and charges of manual generation and sometimes their work outstrips the geometry to reach the semantics at a higher level. However, for faster and better perfor- mance, we are focusing on the visualisation and management of real-world data and more precisely geographic data for the web. This data is written in different standards and is largely available to users and cost free. This paper proposes a user intu- itive solution based on the quite recent ArcGIS software Application Programming Interface (API) and CityGML (Geography Markup Language) in order to visualise and manage a real interactive editable city. 1. Introduction complementary, and interoperability between them is essential to achieve all the solution capabilities of the 3D cities environment. The advancement in computer graphics and web technologies have Up to now, there have been many web-based attempts to provide largely revolutionized large data reconstruction and management 3D contents using specific plugins. Our solution of city visualisa- techniques. This allowed large data to be revealed to the user who tion suggests developping a web application dependent on the two could more easily interact and interpret large 3D data such as urban standards explained above. The final objective is to allow the user environments. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) based appli- to reconstruct the geometry and manipulate the semantics of the 3D cations have made rapid evolution in the web, which has created a layers from the CityGML file. need to develop platform-independent web applications, based on recent standards and formats. In this paper, we will address in the first section existing web- based solutions for real cities rendering and visualisation. We will CityGML [KGP05] is a common Information Model and an then explain our ArcGIS API-based solution tools and require- XML (Extensible Markup Language)-based encoding that de- ments in details. In Section 3, we will hold a discussion about the scribes 3D objects with respect to their geometry, topology, seman- solution, followed by a comparison between our solution and the tics, and appearance. It aims at describing, storing and exchanging widely used WebGL framework "Cesium" in the case study of sec- virtual 3D models. This standard not only allows to understand the tion 4. In this section we will eventually discuss the limitation of the spatial properties of urban data, but also provides a common plat- Cesium framework. Finally we will conclude our paper and suggest form to integrate city level information from different resources and our future research direction. make them accessible to the concerned people. ArcGIS [Arc] is a GIS (Geographic Information System) that 2. 3D Cities Visualisation works with maps and geographic information. It allows the cre- ation and use of maps, compilation of geographic data and analysis Three-dimensional city models are considered a very important of mapped information. This information system provides an in- resource for multi-purposes domains such as urban planning and frastructure for making maps and geographic information available decision-making [VOSL05]. Many of them are based on informa- throughout an organization, across a community, and openly on the tion stored in GIS. This direction is worse exploring because of web. many advantages it offers such as the large amount of data avail- able to the user, presented in different types and formats [SH15]. The ArcGIS 3D has a City Information Model called (3DCIM) This allows the user the possibility to embed the data in one single that works very well for data management, analysis, and visualisa- interface and create multi-purposes applications. tion. With the 3DCIM, 3D city models can be brought into ArcGIS and used for a wide range of applications. Therefore, these two are 3D city visualisation is a largely investigated research topic since city models became widely available. Recent works have been pro- the solutions of rendering real cities with a fluid experience posed for this purpose and several solutions for porting the frame- to the user [VMNRG15]. OSM (OpenStreetMap) offers a large works on the web are investigated. The work of Rodriguez et open source geospatial data. Some projects such as OSM Build- al. [RFC13] describes how GIS for the 3D web is implemented by ings [OSM] use OpenStreetMap as their database and manage to converting CITYGML into X3D models and is visualized through display 3D models of a great number of cities. the web. Implementations about the use of WebGL frameworks for CityEngine [cita] is a 3D modeling software application devel- 3D geospatial applications are presented in the work of Kramer and oped by Esri R& D center Zurich and is specialized in the gener- Gutbell [RKT09]. ation of 3D urban environments. CityEngine supports the creation To support 3D visualisation on the web an emerging technology of detailed large-scale 3D city models. The software uses a proce- is for sure WebGL. On top of WebGL a number of OpenSource dural modeling approach to automatically generate models through frameworks that offer high-level application programming inter- a predefined rule set. It offers the possibility to directly publish the faces (APIs) are quickly growing on the Internet community. In created scenes on the web for sharing 3D models, analysis results, this paper, we will compare our solution for dynamic visualisation or design proposals with decision makers or the public. based on ArcGIS API with the webGL framework Cesium largely used for the same purpose. Another project that uses a declarative approach for 3D render- ing is CityServer3D [citb]. Cesium is an open source javascript li- brary [ces] to create 3D virtual globes as well as 2D maps on a web 2.1. 3D Visualisation: Tools, Standards and Software browser. Its advantage is the possibility to integrate layer imageries from different sources such as OpenStreetMap, ArcGIS MapServer In order to visualize a city in real-time, Beck [Bec03] directly em- and standard image files. It also includes libraries that support 2D loyed OpenGL to visualise 3D city models. In order to achieve the as well as 3D geometries. high speed, the framework employed the computer graphics re- lated technologies such as pre-stripping the triangles, frame con- trols, texture management etc. The data is contained in a databse in 2.2. 3D City Storage self-defined 3D format and integrated with the textures. LODs are used to display several geometric representations of the same object Object- Oriented databases are nowadays the most used to store at different times. Fewer details are represented when the object is 3D model building information [LFB11]. The CityGML schema far away and more detailed when it is closer to the observer. uses dedicated tools to manage city models within most popular databases such as PostGIS and Oracle. According to Mao et al. ∗ Dollner et al. (2005) [DB05] presented a direct illustrative visu- [MHC 14] and Han et al. [HS12] , recent databases: NoSQL, Mon- alisation technique to provide expressive representations of large- godb and Hbase have been investigated as alternative systems to scale 3D city models. Their rendering algorithm consists of four store 3D information. phases: Phase 1 generates a texture encoding shadowed regions in image space, Phase 2 renders the scene with enhanced image-space The 3D City Database (3DCityDB) Importer Exporter [Dat] is edges, shaded and textured facades, Phase 3 renders stylized edges, an open source used to import CityGML files to a 3D city database and Phase 4 renders remaining components of the 3D city model. and export the contents from this database in an earth browser com- patible format.