3D City Model of Copenhagen from Open National Data

More and more European Union Member States are recognising the potential value of Open Data and are acting upon it. Open Data portals are in place, increasingly backed by solid…
3 min read
771

More and more European Union Member States are recognising the potential value of Open Data and are acting upon it. Open Data portals are in place, increasingly backed by solid Open Data policies. But it is not only the national level that matters. For a successful national Open Data initiative, the whole publication chain should be taken into account. Cities have an important role to play here.

Recommended Article: Location-Based Services and Smart City Initiatives on a Global Scale

Specifically, the larger European cities publish a lot of data on topics such as urban planning, tourism, and increasingly real-time data in the transport and mobility area, such as datasets on available parking spots. Moreover, cities also benefit from the use of Open Data to tackle typical urban challenges such as congestion and pollution, and to improve the quality of urban public services and the interactivity between the local government and citizens.

3D City Models

There are numerous applications of 3D city models, briefly; town planning, architecture, municipal asset management, security and defence, emergency evacuation planning, accident and catastrophic risk assessment, positioning services, information services, virtual reality, commercial visual effects and advertisements, telecommunications, visualizations, fly-through animations, and so on.

Open Data in European Cities

A new European Data Portal analytical report investigates Open Data initiatives in eight medium-sized European cities, after having analysed Open Data initiatives in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Copenhagen, London, Paris, Stockholm and Vienna in a previous report, published in June 2016. Cities covered in this report include Dublin, Florence, Gdansk, Ghent, Helsinki, Lisbon, Thessaloniki and Vilnius. All of these cities have Open Data strategies and portals in place, which are not stand-alone initiatives but are embedded in broader digital or Smart City strategies.

Open Data in Denmark

The data model connected information ranging from geospatial and cadastral information to data on individuals and businesses. Making these datasets interoperable would allow improved public services and bring about considerable cost savings from the resulting efficiencies. At the time, some of these datasets were not available on a free and open basis, and many were created and/or held by individual public authorities.

A large number of geospatial datasets were made publicly available under a free and open data license. They include:

  • Topographic data in various formats and scales, including themes such as road networks, buildings, forests, built-up areas, etc.;
  • Place names, also known as “geonames”;
  • A portfolio of products related to elevation, including a LiDAR point cloud, a terrain model, and a surface model;
  • Administrative units;
  • Cadastral information and parcels;
  • Location-based addresses;
  • Ortophotos

3D City Model of Copenhagen

So we all wonder how they manage to build a 3D city model from open-sourced data.

Here are the key points:

• Dataset: – “Danmarks Højdemodel, DHM/Punktsky – Published 2016-04-07 – City of Copenhagen – “Skraafoto” (oblique and nadir images)- Published 2019.

• Classified data has been vectorized using TerraScan without editing or additional data.
TerraScan is the main application in the TerraSolid Software family for managing and processing LiDAR point clouds. It offers import and project structuring tools for handling the large amount of points of a laser scanning campaign as well as the corresponding trajectory information. Various classification routines enable the automatic filtering of the point cloud. The results from the automatic classification can be refined by using half-automatic and manual classification tools in combination with versatile 3D point cloud visualization options.

• Image orientation has been enhanced using TerraPhoto.

• Building textures have been extracted from raw images and attached to walls using TerraPhoto.
TerraPhoto is specifically developed for processing images captured together with laser data during a survey mission. The software enables the production of rectified images and orthomosaics based on a ground model that has been extracted from the laser data.

• True orthophotos have been created for terrain draping and roof textures using TerraPhoto and vectorized building data.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqIRARu8XnU
The video is created using TerraPhoto Flythrough Movies tools.

About TerraSolid

TerraSolid develops software products that are used worldwide for processing point cloud and image data from airborne and mobile LiDAR systems. Running inside Bentley’s MicroStation CAD software, TerraSolid offers a variety of tools for viewing, analyzing, and extracting features from 3d point clouds accurately and efficiently.

Additional modules offer workflows for LiDAR sensor calibration and point cloud data correction, surface modeling, and orthophoto generation from LiDAR and imagery. TerraSolid software supports LiDAR data from all sources; airborne, mobile, and static scanners.

Visit TerraSolid’s website for more information, products updates, and useful links.

Sources: copernicus.eu, EuropeanDataPortal, TerraSolid, GeoCue

Suggested Articles

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Fill out this field
Fill out this field
Please enter a valid email address.
You need to agree with the terms to proceed