2004 Asia Broadband Symposium on Digital City Collaboration

Urban Site Modeling Based on 3D Scanning Technologies

Hongbin Zha

Professor, Department of Intelligence Science, Peking University, China

3D modeling of urban sites offers significant potential for a variety of applications ranging from urban planning, intelligent transportation, disaster simulation, to digital heritage conservation. Until now, while most of the researches have been devoted to the analysis of digital aerial images, a lot of attempts have appeared to produce urban models by integrating airborne and ground-based laser scanning data. In particular, recent achievements in ground-based close-range laser scanning have made it possible to create high-quality 3D models of historic built architectures or streets by using dense point clouds and high-resolution texture images. However, to make these models really useful, we also need to develop novel methods for interactive exploration and analysis of large-scale urban datasets. To the end, some new outcomes from machine vision and graphics fields, such as LOD (level of details) and point-based reconstruction techniques, have to be integrated in the traditional approaches. In the talk, the speaker will provide an overview of these new modeling methods with ground-based laser scanners as main data acquisition sensors. In addition, some results on the related topics from the 3DVCR (3D Visual Computing and Robotics) group, Peking University, will be also introduced.

Hongbin Zha received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Kyushu University, Japan, in 1990. After working as a Research Associate in the Department of Control Engineering and Science, Kyushu Institute of Technology, Japan, he joined Kyushu University in 1991 as an Associate Professor. He was also a Visiting Professor in the Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing, Surrey University, UK, in 1999. Since 2000, he has been Professor at the Center for Information Science, Peking University, China.  He is now Vice Dean of the School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, and Director of the National Lab on Machine Perception, Peking University.

Dr. Zha's research interests include computer vision, 3D geometric modeling, digital museum and robotics. He has over 120 technical publications in various journals, books and international conference proceedings. He received the Franklin V. Taylor Awards from IEEE SMC Society in 1999. He is an associate editor of Advance Robotics, and served as guest editors for IEEE Trans. SMC, Trans. IEICE. Contact him at zha@cis.pku.edu.cn. For more details on his research activities, see http://www.cis.pku.edu.cn/seeing/Visual&Robot/intro.html.