Generating Historical Urban 3D-Scenarios for Use in Google Earth Representing the Medieval City of Duisburg

Generating Historical Urban 3D-Scenarios for Use in Google Earth Representing the Medieval City of Duisburg. The presentation of 3D city models within earth browsers, such as Google Earth, is becoming more and more popular due to the realistic view of the scenes. In addition to the presentation of actual sceneries, historical situations can be visualized as well. This paper describes the generation of historical urban 3D-scenarios for use in Google Earth, representing the medieval city of Duisburg in the years 1000, 1200 and 1566. Wooden models on a scale of 1 :500 exhibited in the Kultur- und Stadthistorisches Museum Duisburg had been captured by terrestrial laser scanning with the Z+F IMAGER 5006 system. The point clouds together with ortho-images of the wooden models are used to estimate automatically the geometry of standardised buildings on a large scale. The historical Corputius map as well as archaeological knowledge is used to texture the virtual reconstruction of the models.