Automatic mesh representation of urban environments

A robust watertight mesh generation framework for urban cityscape and waterscape is proposed. The framework, consisting of a set of algorithms implemented in MATLAB, uses geospatial data available from OpenStreetMap and United States Geological Survey repositories, and incorporates Triangle - a popular two-dimensional Delaunay triangulation software - to develop the mesh. For the cityscape component, the facades of the buildings are meshed as structured triangular grids while the roofs and terrains are meshed as unstructured triangular grids using Triangle. For the waterscape component, quadrilateral cells are created based on the requirements of Environmental Fluids Dynamics Code (EFDC) model – a popular modeling platform for environmental fluid flow analysis. The resulting mesh generated is watertight with little human intervention and can serve as a significant preprocessing tool in environmental computational fluid dynamics. Although, there are a few existing methodologies in the literature, most are limited in capacity and are difficult to implement.