SBIR-STTR Award

The ability to represent and model buildings, interiors, and subterranean areas for simulation has become increasingly important for a number of disparate markets, including government applications in simulation of military operations in urban terrain, chem/bio flow analysis, and first responder and anti-terrorist training, as well as commercial applications in real-time visualization of planned developments, traffic and transportation flow analysis, and viewshed inspection. However, current tools do not address the automated generation of building interiors and critical underground structures, let alone the integration of these generated models into a consistent three dimensional representation suitable for supporting modeling and simulation activities. CAD tools provide capabilities well suited for geometric modeling, but not the attribution or topology necessary to drive constructive simulation; consumer products lack representations for attribution, topology, and rigorous geographic coordinates. This Phase I effort will produce a detailed design of an efficient, flexible, and powerful urban authoring tool that would serve as an enabling technology for numerous government and commercial interior and subterranean urban modeling applications. Such a tool will enable users to easily and accurately construct realistic geospecific and geotypical interiors and subterranean structures in well-populated urban contexts, exportable with full attribution to current simulation formats.

Benefits:
Applications include simulation of urban operations, chem/bio propagation analysis, first-responder and anti-terrorist training, real-time visualization of planned developments, traffic and transportation flow analysis, and viewshed inspection.

Keywords:
urban visualization, building interiors, subterranean structure modeling, SAF interior representations

This Proposal addresses important problems within the realm of modeling of urban areas for visual simulation, including the modeling of external building geometry, the rapid capture of building appearances, and the modeling of underground structures. Modeling complex building geometry for detailed urban simulation and visualization is expensive and requires trained personnel. We will implement novel methods to efficiently utilize point clouds from ground-based laser scanners to obtain precise building geometry. Simulation and training for urban operation now requires realistic underground structures; we will extend our current capabilities in this area to allow easier and more automated generation of such structures. Building appearances are important visual cues and often determines the believability of a simulation. We will implement innovative techniques to quickly extract image textures from COTS video camera sequences and apply those textures to building models.

Keywords:
Urban Visualization, Urban Modeling, Urban Simulation, Building Modeling, Texture Extraction, Lidar, Underground Structure Modeling