Developing a toolchain for providing automatically highly accurate 3D database

The usage of databases containing 3D information is getting more and more importance in various domains like traffic management, urban construction, simulation of safety critical driver assistance systems etc. Nevertheless current approaches do not tap the full potential of such databases. Most of them are set up by hand and do only contain data suitable for one main purpose. In this paper a tool chain approach is presented that combines automatically generation of 3D landscapes with precise real world data (like cadastral plans, road measurement, aerial photographs, navigation data, etc.) for usage in more than one field of application. This tool chain is developing by the Institute of Transportation Systems within the project called “SimWorld”. SimWorld sets up a database in the domain for transportation research. Therefore it was necessary to focus on road representation in a new and very detailed way. Additionally a representation of urban environment and rural areas including high quality visualization needs to be generated out of this data. A special database schema reflects these both issues. In the following the database design and the tool chain modules will be discussed in comparison to existing approaches and explained in detail. Also the topic of the project outcome and the further development of the Sim-World tool chain will be touched on