A three-step approach of simplifying 3D buildings modeled by CityGML

CityGML (City Geography Markup Language), the OGC (Open Open Geospatial Consortium) standard on three-dimensional (3D) city modeling, is widely used in an increasing number of applications, because it models a city with rich geometrical and semantic information. The underlying building model differentiates four consecutive levels of detail (LoDs). Nowadays, most city buildings are reconstructed in LoD3, while few landmarks in LoD4. For visualization or other purposes, buildings in LoD2 or LoD1 need to be derived from LoD3 models. But CityGML does not indicate methods for the automatic derivation of the different LoDs. This article presents an approach for deriving LoD2 buildings from LoD3 models which are essentially the exterior shells of buildings without opening objects. This approach treats different semantic components of a building separately with the aim to preserve the characteristics of ground plan, roof, and wall structures as far as possible. The process is composed of three steps: simplifying wall elements, generalizing roof structures, and then reconstructing the 3D building by intersecting the wall and roof polygons. The first step simplifies ground plan with wall elements projected onto the ground. A new algorithm is developed to handle not only simple structures like parallel and rectangle shapes but also complicated structures such as non-parallel, non-rectangular shapes and long narrow angles. The algorithm for generalizing roof structure is based on the same principles; however, the calculation has to be conducted in 3D space. Moreover, the simplified polygons of roof structure are further merged and typified depending on the spatial relations between two neighboring polygons. In the third step, generalized 3D buildings are reconstructed by increasing walls in height and intersecting with roof structures. The approach has been implemented and tested on a number of 3D buildings. The experiments have verified that the 3D building can be efficiently generalized, while the characteristics of wall and roof structure can be well preserved after the simplification.