A semantic modeling method to river networks for large-scale 3D virtual water environment

Abstract

Existing publicly available data of river network generally have low accuracy and even the data of confluence area are inconsistent with the physical characteristics of water flow, which makes it difficult to been directly used for modeling water environments. In this paper, to solve this problem, a semantic modeling method of river network for large-scale 3D virtual water environment is proposed. Firstly, the semantic objects of the river network with hierarchical coupling relationships are constructed by River, Link and Intersection. The constituent areas of the river network are refined, and the topological relationships among different areas of the river network are represented. Secondly, the geometric semantic data of the intersection area are divided into three categories, including intersection boundary, confluence boundary and tributary boundary, based on the influence of the flow dynamics. The Chézy’s formula is introduced to model the tributary boundary, which is significantly impacted by water flow scouring. Finally, the boundary data of various areas in the river network are automatically generated based on these semantic data. The experimental results indicate that high-precision boundary data can be automatically generated for different river network areas, which can improve the realism and reliability of river network virtual simulation. Additionally, the generated boundary data can also be used for large-scale 3D virtual water environment simulation modeling.