Urban Weathering: Interactive Rendering of Polluted Cities

Abstract

Weathering effects are ubiquitous phenomena in cities. Buildings age and deteriorate over time as they interact with the environment. Pollution accumulating on facades is a particularly visible consequence of this. Even though relevant work has been done to produce impressive images of virtual urban environments including weathering effects, so far, no technique using a global approach has been proposed to deal with weathering effects. Here, we propose a technique based on a fast physically-inspired approach, that focuses on modeling the changes in appearance due to pollution soiling on an urban scale. We consider pollution effects to depend on three main factors: wind, rain and sun exposure, and we take into account three intervening steps: deposition, reaction and washing. Using a low-cost pre-computation, we evaluate the pollution distribution throughout the city. Based on this and the use of screen-space operators, our method results in an efficient approach able to generate realistic images of urban scenes by combining the intervening factors at interactive rates. In addition, the pre-computation demands a reduced amount of memory to store the resulting pollution map and, as it is independent from scene complexity, it can suit large and complex models by adapting the map resolution.

Foresight as a Tool for the Planning and Implementation of Visions for Smart City Development

“…Together with a growing popularity of the smart city concept, there appear numerous new projects based on innovative technologies helping cities to solve the emerging problems of technical infrastructure [1,2], pollution and environmental protection [3,4], waste management [5,6], spatial development [7,8], logistics and urban transport [9,10], ageing society [11,12], poverty [13,14] and low levels of involvement of residents in public affairs [15,16]. After all, many of them fail to satisfy their initial objectives due to the fact that they are not adapted to the complexity, diversity and uncertainty characterising contemporary cities [17].…”

Observation-driven generation of texture maps depicting dust accumulation over time

“…It is worth noting that physically inspired (instead of physically based) methods are extensively employed in different areas of computer graphics (e.g. [ 4 , 37 , 41 , 46 ]). These methods, albeit inspired by real physical observations, are developed from a relaxation of physically based methodology in order to avoid complex formulations and, consequently, keep the representation of different materials plausible at a relatively low cost.…”

Smart city concept in the light of the literature review

“…• environmental pollution (Caparros-Midwood et al, 2019;Alam et al, 2019;Munoz-Pandiella et al, 2018;Kosheleva et al, 2018); • urban logistics (Nataraj et al, 2019;Firdausiyah et al, 2019;Bjørgen et al, 2019;Cleophas et al, 2019;Faramehr et al, 2019;Mesjasz-Lech, 2014;Tomaszewska & Florea, 2018); • technical infrastructure (Petrova & Prodromidou, 2019;Faramehr et al, 2019;Pham & Phan, 2018;Juget & Ryckewaert, 2018); • waste management (Bugge et al, 2019;Amritha & Kumar, 2019;Dlamini et al, 2019;Scorţar et al, 2010); • aging population (Jayantha et al, 2018;Fang & Lai, 2018;Onoda, 2018;Greenfield, 2018;Jarocka & Wang, 2018); • stratification of wealth levels, areas of poverty (Muktiali, 2018;Lanjouw & Marra, 2018;Ma et al, 2018;Aguilar & López, 2016); • low level of citizen participation in the management of public affairs (Mavrodieva et al, 2019;Sou, 2019;van Holm, 2019;de Castro Pena et al, 2017). Knowing the identified challenges and the expected increase in the number of urban residents around the world, there is an increasing need for new and innovative ways to manage the complexity of urban life.…”