3D City Modelling of Istanbul

Abstract

The Turkish metropolis of Istanbul is developing a 3D city model mainly aimed at urban planning, The data sources used so far include airborne Lidar, aerial images and 2D maps containing footprints of buildings. Everybody engaged in creating 3D models of large cities faces many issues, challenges and limitations, including excessive data storage requirements, the need for manual editing, incompleteness and other data quality problems. In this article, the authors share their experiences of creating models of the city of Istanbul at the level of detail (LOD) 2 and 3.