Method for 3D City Building Continuous Transformation Based on an Improved LOD Topological Data Structure

Abstract

A 3D city model is an intuitive tool that is used to describe cities. Currently, level-of-detail (LOD) technology is used to meet different visual demands for 3D city models by weighting the rendering efficiency against the details of the model. However, when the visual demands change, the “popping” phenomenon appears when making transformations between different LOD models. We optimized this popping phenomenon by improving the data structure that focuses on 3D city building models and combined it with the facet shift algorithm based on minimal features. Unlike generating finite LOD models in advance, the proposed continuous LOD topology data structure is able to store the changes between different LOD models. By reasonably using the change information, continuous LOD transformation becomes possible. The experimental results showed that the continuous LOD transformation based on the proposed data structure worked well, and the improved data structure also performed well in memory occupation.