PCA based 3D City Model Generalization for Electricity Simulation

3D city models are widely used in many applications such as electricity simulation, urban planning, navigation, transportation, city management and so on. One of the key issues in the 3D city study fields is how to reduce the complexity of 3D city models. In this paper, we present a novel method to simply the 3D city object using PCA (Principal component analysis). Different from the ordinary 3D objects in computer graphics, polygons in 3D city objects are usually correlated e.g. parallel to each other or nearly located in the same plane. Therefore, PCA can reduce the data volume efficiently. According to the experimental results, the proposed method can compress the 3D city models by 95% while preserving the overall similarity between the simplified and original models.