Study of City Landscape Heritage Using Lidar Data and 3d-City Models

In contemporary town planning protection of urban landscape is a significant issue. It regards especially those cities, where urban structures are the result of ages of evolution and layering of historical development process. Specific panoramas and other strategic views with historic city dominants can be an important part of the cultural heritage and genius loci. Other hand, protection of such expositions introduces limitations for future based city development. Digital Earth observation techniques creates new possibilities for more accurate urban studies, monitoring of urbanization processes and measuring of city landscape parameters. The paper examines possibilities of application of Lidar data and digital 3D-city models for: a) evaluation of strategic city views, b) mapping landscape absorption limits, and c) determination protection zones, where the urbanization and buildings height should be limited. In reference to this goal, the paper introduces a method of computational analysis of the city landscape called Visual Protection Surface (VPS). The method allows to emulate a virtual surface above the city including protection of a selected strategic views. The surface defines maximum height of buildings in such a way, that no new facility can be seen in any of selected views. The research includes also analyses of the quality of simulations according the form and precision of the input data: airborne Lidar / DSM model and more advanced 3D-city models (incl. semantic of the geometry, like in CityGML format). The outcome can be a support for professional planning of tall building development. Application of VPS method have been prepared by a computer program developed by the authors (C++). Simulations were carried out on an example of the city of Dresden