This is my wife and I's first prototype on a daughter. She was released a couple of weeks ago and we think she is so perfect that we will probably keep her for production

Finally! The project I have been working on for almost a year has become public: All ~2.5 million buildings in Denmark modeled in 3D. According to our (of course very trustworthy) marketing people, this is the first nation wide 'city' model. Well, Denmark is 43000 km² and a lot of that area is actually rural, so maybe it isn't right to call it a 'city' model

My employer BlomInfo has made photogrammetrically measured 3D city models for a lot of years. These models are very detailed and of extremely high visual and geometric quality, but they require a lot of manual work for each building and are therefore relatively expensive to produce. Using a new production method the production cost has been reduced to something relatively low compared to photogrammetry and that makes it feasible to run it on the entire country.

The models that we have made nationwide are made in a 100% automatic way using building footprints and our nationwide LIDAR data (description in Danish). The LIDAR data has a mean point distance of approximately 1.6 meters which gives us about 19 billion points in all. It may sound like a lot, but 1.6 meters is actually pretty sparse in the context of roof modeling, so the difficult part has been to build an algorithm that is robust on these data and that gracefully handles the variations in data that are inevitable in such a large dataset.

Before it was just a research and development project, and now it is funny to see that my algorithm has made it to the Danish news (all in Danish):

http://www.comon.dk/news/nu.er.hele.danmark.kortlagt.i.3d_38216.html

http://newz.dk/danmark-nu-i-3d#new

http://www.erhvervsbladet.dk/article/20081022/news05/81022118/

http://www.mobilsiden.dk/?aId=6947

http://gisdk.blogspot.com/

http://www.crn.dk/index.php/news/show/id=30955

I haven't got any screen dumps on this computer, but I'll try and upload some as soon as possible. Trouble is that the annual Danish geodata convention Kortdage is coming up on Monday, so everybody (me included) is pretty busy.

This is the first post to my new personal blog.

For too long I have followed the discussions in the geospatial blogosphere without being able to contribute. As I intend to use the posts as excuse for some small self educating projects, I am probably not going to post daily or even weekly. The posts are going to act as a sort of note to self, but I guess they might sometimes be of interest to others.

So: I hereby declare this blog opened!