Modeling and visualizing the cultural heritage data set of Graz

Abstract

The inner city (Old Town) of Graz will be the European cultural capital in 2003. In this paper we present preliminary results on the reconstruction and visualization of this kind of cultural heritage data. Starting with a simple block model obtained by converting 2 1/2 dimensional GIS (geographic information system) data we focus on the image based modeling of the facades. Herein we illustrate a robust search for corresponding points to estimate the relative orientation between image pairs.Additional, we outline our real-time rendering approach based on a LOD-R-tree concept. Special attention is paid on the LOD (level of detail) generation for historic buildings where two different ways working in 2D and 3D are explained. The visualization system is communicating asynchronously with a database system storing the LOD-R-tree data structure. This client-server configuration provides interactive navigation through the virtual scene and the scalability of a database management system.