Template-Based 3D Road Modeling for Generating Large-Scale Virtual Road Network Environment

The 3D road network scene helps to simulate the distribution of road infrastructure and the corresponding traffic conditions. However, the existing road modeling methods have limitations such as inflexibility in different types of road construction, inferior quality in visual effects and poor efficiency for large-scale model rendering. To tackle these challenges, a template-based 3D road modeling method is proposed in this paper. In this method, the road GIS data is first pre-processed before modeling. The road centerlines are analyzed to extract topology information and resampled to improve path accuracy and match the terrain. Meanwhile, the road network is segmented and organized using a hierarchical block data structure. Road elements, including roadbeds, road facilities and moving vehicles are then designed based on templates. These templates define the geometric and semantic information of elements along both the cross-section and road centerline. Finally, the road network scene is built by the construction algorithms, where roads, at-grade intersections, grade separated areas and moving vehicles are modeled and simulated separately. The proposed method is tested by generating large-scale virtual road network scenes in the World Wind, an open source software package. The experimental results demonstrate that the method is flexible and can be used to develop different types of road models and efficiently simulate large-scale road network environments.