Web-based Visualisation of the Generalised 3D City Models using HTML5 and X3DOM

Abstract
Efficient visualisation of 3D city models in various scales is one of the pivotal techniques to support applications in mobile and Internet environments. In this paper, a framework is proposed to visualise online 3D city models using Internet Browsers without plugins. The City Geography Makeup Language (CityGML) and Extensible 3D (X3D) are used to represent and present the 3D city models. Then, generalisation methods are studied and tailored to create 3D city scenes in block, building and facade levels dynamically; multiple representation structures are designed to preserve the generalisation results in different scales. Finally, the quality of generalised 3D city models is evaluated by the experimental results.