Image-Based City Modeling

Videotrace City Modeling
Some time ago a friend told me that when he was a young boy, his mom explained him that at the time he would be an adult, mankind wouldn’t have to work any more, as machines and robots should have taken over all jobs by that time. Twenty years later it seems that the post-Fordist society has made our lives busier than ever before. Nevertheless, technology could absolutely make life easier. Today I found out about a great piece of software called VideoTrace, which intends to simplify 3D modeling tremendously.

The program can be used for architectural modeling, city modeling, creation of virtual environments, and video editing. The great thing is, VideoTrace allows a user to create realistic models of object from video sequences and from images and makes generating the geometry a very easy job. The user interacts with VideoTrace by tracing the shape of the object to be modelled over one or more frames of the video. Check out the video below to see Copenhagen’s Nyhavn being turned into a 3D model.


City modeling has never been easier. The software “uses image data to interpret the user interactions, but exploits 3D point clouds when available, to guide the fitting process. It is thus well suited to the case where a laser scanner or similar has been used to generate a set of depth samples in addition to the imagery”. Visit the website to see more inspiring videos.