Approaches Towards Visual 3 D Analysis for Digital Landscapes and Its Applications

This contribution outlines approaches towards automatic visual 3D analysis of virtual 3D landscape models. We introduce different notions and definitions of concepts and functions for visual 3D analysis and outline a generic function that determines visual analytic measures among objects of landscape models. This class of functions can be used as a general tool to derive various landscape characteristics and measures on a per-object basis. We also show how these tools can be efficiently implemented to cope with large, complex landscape models. The approach exemplifies how landscape models can be used in the scope of analysis and simulation, which possibly will lead to a class of metrics and characteristics that can be automatically determined and, thereby, may help to systematically characterize and compare landscape plans and concepts.