Can topological pre-culling of faces improve rendering performance of city models in google earth?

Abstract

3D City Models are becoming more prevalent, and have many applications including city walk-throughs or fly-throughs to show what a new building would look like in situ, or whether a view or light will be blocked by a new structure, flood modeling, satellite and signal modeling. Often, these models are created using a process of extrusion of 2D topographic mapping, resulting in Level of Detail 1 buildings with flat roofs. The models can contain many thousands of polyhedra, which in turn results in performance issues when attempting to visualize such models in virtual earth applications such as Google Earth. This paper presents the results of a series of tests to determine whether using a topological approach to pre-cull hidden Faces from the model can bring about performance improvements. Such an approach could also be said to be one step towards the generalization of such models to support multiple levels of detail. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.