Procedural Urban Forestry

Abstract

Fig. 1. Steps of our learning-based plant population method: we use satellite images (a) and predict coverage maps for vegetation (b). We use these maps to identify plant regions for reconstruction (c) and to learn parameters for our procedural models when populating new virtual cities with complex plants (d), which significantly increases the realism of urban landscapes (e).The placement of vegetation plays a central role in the realism of virtual scenes. We introduce procedural placement models (PPMs) for vegetation in urban layouts. PPMs are environmentally sensitive to city geometry and allow identifying plausible plant positions based on structural and functional zones in an urban layout. PPMs can either be directly used by defining their parameters or can be learned from satellite images and land register data. Together with approaches for generating buildings and trees, this allows us to populate urban landscapes with complex 3D vegetation. The effectiveness of our framework is shown through examples of large-scale city scenes and close-ups of individually grown tree models; we also validate it by a perceptual user study.CCS Concepts: • Computing methodologies → Shape analysis; • Theory of computation → Grammars and context-free languages; Rewrite systems.