Abstract
The ability to create and edit a model of a large-scale city is necessary for a variety of applications such as web-based navigation (e.g., MapQuest, GoogleEarth),
emergency response training and simulation, urban planning, and content creation for the entertainment industry. Satellite and aerial photographs provide overhead
views of large urban spaces. Although the layout of the urban space is captured as images, it consists of a complex collection of man-made structures arranged in parcels,
city blocks, and neighborhoods. Treating the content as unstructured images yields undesirable results (e.g., building deformation, interrupted streets/blocks). However,
most GIS, maintain and provide digital records of metadata such as road network, land use, parcel boundaries, building type, water/sewage pipes and power lines that can be
used as a starting point to infer and manipulate higher-level structure. We describe an editor for interactive reconfiguration of city layouts, which provides tools to expand,
scale, replace and move parcels and blocks, while efficiently exploiting their connectivity and zoning. Our results include applying the system on several cities with different
urban layout by sequentially applying different transformations to their layouts. We interactively replace parts of a city, move blocks of the urban layout with minimal
deformation, alter streets, and maintain their connectivity when so desired.
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