OSM-Based Automatic Road Network Geometries Generation on Unity

Abstract: Nowadays, while 3D city reconstruction has been widely used in important topics like urban design and traffic simulation, frameworks to efficiently model large-scale road network based on data from the real world are of high interests. However, the diversity of the form of road networks is still a challenge for automatic reconstruction, and the information extracted from input data can highly determine the final effect to display. In this project, OpenStreetMap data is chosen as the only input of a three-stage method to efficiently generate a geometric model of the associated road network in varied forms. The method is applied to datasets from cities in the real world of different scales, rendered and presented the generated models on Unity3D platform, and compared them with the original road networks in both the quality and topology aspects. The results suggest that our method can reconstruct the features of original road networks in common cases such as three-way, four-way intersections, and roundabouts while consuming much shorter time than manual modeling in a large-scale urban scene. This framework contributes to an auxiliary tool for quick city traffic system reconstruction of multiple purposes, while there still being space of improvement for the modeling universality and quality of the method.