Interactive Urban Context-Aware Visualization via Multiple Disocclusion Operators

In 3D urban environments, features of interest (FOIs) are often occluded by clusters of buildings, which prevent a clear overview of important spatial features. State-of-the-art disocclusion methods for urban environments fall short of preserving cityscape appearance or require time-consuming computation. These methods use only one or two operators for disocclusion and might not strike a good balance between disocclusion and distortion control. We present a novel, automatic method enabling interactive context-aware visualization of urban features of interest, which combines four effective disocclusion operators including viewpoint elevation, road shifting, building scaling, and building displacement to disocclude the features of interest. Our method provides an optimum compromise among the disocclusion operators via an efficient constrained optimization and the post-polishing phrases, which minimizes the distortions while enforcing the visibility of the FOIs. The 3D views generated at interactive frame rates ensure a resemblance in the cityscape appearance to its original ones and provide a good overview of the FOIs. The experiments with real data demonstrate that our method can greatly facilitate tasks such as navigation, wayfinding, and information overlay.