Photo-realistic visualization of seismic dynamic responses of urban building clusters based on oblique aerial photography

Highly realistic visualizations of seismic dynamic responses of building clusters are critical for earthquake safety education. To this end, a photo-realistic visualization method of the seismic dynamic responses of urban building clusters is proposed based on oblique aerial photography. Specifically, a sparsification algorithm of aerial photograph footprints and the model optimization solutions are designed to reduce the size of a city model reconstructed by oblique aerial photography. A building segmentation algorithm based on Boolean operations and building footprints is designed to separate buildings from a reconstructed three-dimensional city model. A visualization algorithm for the seismic dynamic responses of building clusters is designed based on the Callback mechanism, by which the shaking process of building clusters can be realistically displayed according to the results of a city-scale nonlinear time-history analysis. New Beichuan City in China is adopted as a case study to visualize seismic dynamic response. The visualization produced by the proposed method is more realistic than that of the finite element method and can support decision making on earthquake safety actions. The outcome of this study provides well-founded and photo-realistic scenes of the seismic dynamic response of building clusters and has promising application prospects for earthquake safety education.