Perception-motivated visualization for 3D city scenes

Bin Pan, Yong Zhao, Xiaoming Guo, Xiang Chen, Wei Chen, Qunsheng Peng

Abstract: Many approaches have been developed to visualize 3D city scenes, most of which exhibit the visualization results in a uniform rendering style. This paper presents an expressive rendering approach for visualizing large-scale 3D city scenes with various rendering styles integrated in a seamless way. Each view is actually a combination of the photorealistic rendering and the nonphotorealistic rendering to highlight the information that is interesting for the users and de-emphasize the other that is less important. At run-time, the users are allowed to specify their interested locations interactively. Our system automatically computes the salience of each location and illustrates the entire scene with emphasis in the area of interests. The GPU-based implementation enables interactive realtime performance. Our implementation of a system demonstrates benefits in many applications such as 3D GPS navigation, tourist information, etc. We have performed a pilot user evaluation of the effect for users to access information in 3D city.