From Nationwide Point Clouds to Nationwide 3D Landscape Models

While an increasing number of cities is using 3D geo-information, applications like infrastructure planning and the assessment of environmental impact by noise, wind and air pollution require 3D geo-information over areas covering multiple municipalities. To enable such applications a national 3D landscape model has been produced in the Netherlands by automated fusion of the national 1:10,000 scale topographic database TOP10NL with the national elevation data AHN2. This paper reports on the design and results of this project merging 15 million 2D object with a point cloud of 640 billion points. At the scale of 1:10,000 LoD1 modelling of buildings was considered sufficient. For applications at a larger scale LoD2 models will be required. A strategy for LoD2 building modelling based on roof topology graphs combined with automatic as well as interactive error correction has been developed.