Sunday 20 February 2011

Bringing historic maps to 3D

A team from the University of East Anglia has come up with a new way to digitise, in 3D, the outlines of buildings on historic maps which can lead to a more efficient reconstruction of virtual heritage areas. Published in Elsevier's Computers And Graphics journal the methodology is based on the colouring of maps.

On the occasion where buildings are displayed in characteristic colours, the process is automatic. This operates by detecting blocks of colour on a scan of the map, and then subsequently highlighting the edge of each block. This then generates a clear outline of the building(s). The extracted outlines can be imported into a commercial software package (such as the often mentioned in this blog CityEngine) and then further manipulated.

This is the link to the journal describing the work.

No comments: