Vectorization of gridded urban land use data

Abstract

In the digital entertainment industry, cities are one of the largest artifacts modeled by artists. One alternative to modeling an entire city by hand is to use an urban simulation. Often, those simulations use a gridded terrain representation. Translating gridded simulation results into a more continuous, realistic representation useful in games and film can often be difficult. Our vectorization process transforms gridded urban land use data into a representation useful in entertainment pipelines and many GIS or online mapping tools. The process has three major phases. In the first phase, the raster data is analyzed and the transportation layer is abstracted and filtered. Next, the city blocks are constructed from the raster data. Third, the blocks are subdivided and land use and density are assigned to each constructed parcel. The results are much smoother than the gridded input, but maintain the land use patterns of that input. We output these results in a GIS format readable by a wide range of modeling tools. Copyright 2010 ACM.