In the emerging fully textured 3D city models, the need to highlight important buildings with a high degree of detail and texturing, photo-realistic 3D Land-marks are the latest addition to a sophisticated, reality-based 3D city model.
Close range photogrammetry
In order to construct the detailed and very accurate 3D Landmarks we apply close-range photogrammetry. This is done by capturing several pairs of photos covering the object from all sides. The photographs are carefully planned and captured with overlap which is necessary to acquire highly accurate 3D data from the digital images in a stereo environment. The measured 3D coordinates are used for the manual modeling of the 3D vector model of a building, monument or bridge. The photographs are then cleaned of foreign objects and used for the photo-realistic texturing of the faces of the virtual 3D model in high resolution.
COWI’s 3D Landmarks are not only very realistic; they are also modeled with very high accuracy.