Progressive Transmission of 3D Building Models based on String Grammars and Planar Half-Spaces

As there are numerous applications for 3D city models with a wide range of model requirements regarding geometric accuracy and granularity, there is also a high demand for such models at different levels of detail (LOD). And although their reconstruction and cartographic generalization has been widely studied, particularly with regard to 3D building models, their encoding for a progressive storage and transmission is up to now not profoundly explored and sufficiently solved. Most often building models at different LODs are considered as discrete entities that are not related to each other. In this paper we present a progressive encoding and transmission scheme for 3D building models that is easy to understand and implement for the end user as well as flexible and extensible for the model producer. The progressive scheme is based on string grammars and describes a sequence of successive LODs as a dynamic set of production rules. In order to restrict the effects of LOD changes on a local range of the progressive string representation, we use a solid modelling approach based on planar half-spaces to construct 3D buildings. The generation of such progressive string grammars is shown and examples are given.