- Jeff Thurston’s Vector 1 blog contains a wealth of information on the digital cities movement in Germany.
- The Vienna Univ. of Technology has developed software to automatically detect buildings from a combination of LiDAR and raster imagery.
- We all have an opportunity to benefit from the CityGML investments that are being made in Germany today.
Jeff Thurston hosts the spatially related Vector1 blog. Jeff is based in Berlin, Germany. He recently attended the GI Forum in Salzburg where he reported on research that was being conducted to automate the detection of buildings. A group from the Vienna Univ. of Technology has developed a software that they claim offers significant success in detecting buildings from a combination of LiDAR and raster data built from aerial imagery. Using something called an Echo Ratio they were able to detect 73% of the buildings – impressive. I have contacted the researchers and will be providing greater insight in a future post.
While at Jeff’s site I started to look around and realized that he has been doing a lot of reporting on the digital cities movement in general. Being located in Germany – the world leaders in the adoption of CityGML he is at ground zero. On that topic, he recently reported that the City of Neuss, Germany had recently awarded a contract to the consulting firm known as COWI to build their CityGML model. The project covers some 12 sqkm and approxiamtely 17,000 buildings. I wonder if the folks at COWI are aware of the work being done in Vienna.
A deeper dive into Jeff’s archives reveals even more information on the state of the art in Germany concerning the digital cities movement. The rest of the world is in the fortunate position of being able to observe and learn from the investments being made in Germany. These are the early adopters, and shame on us if we do not take advantage of this incredible opportunity.
