Constructing virtual cities with real activities
A virtual city, a virtual reality system to display an urban scene, is one of the most promising tools for ITS applications, including car navigation aids, shopping guides, and city planning, to name a few. This paper overviews our effort to create virtual cities through a sequence of images obtained with vision/range sensors. Our virtual city consists not of only stationary buildings but also of running and parked vehicles, which reflect the current activities in the real city. The first part of this paper describes how to construct still building images from a sequence of images. Here, we focus on methods employing an omni image camera that acquires images containing rays of 360 degrees viewing directions. The second part describes a system to display vehicle movement in the virtual city based on the image sequence given with a monitoring TV camera at an intersection. It also describes a preliminary step toward displaying illegal parked vehicles from information collected by a probe car.
virtual city omni directional camera traffic and accident analysis laser range sensor