Inverse-Procedural Methods for Urban Models

Procedural modeling is an elegant and fast way to generate huge complex and realistically looking urban sites. Due to its generative nature it can also be referred to as forward-procedural modeling. Its major drawback is the usually quite complicated way of control. To overcome this difficulty a novel modeling paradigm has been introduced: it is commonly referred to as inverse procedural modeling, and its goal is to generate compact procedural descriptions of existing models---in the best case in an automatic manner as possible. These compact procedural representations can be used as a source for the synthesis of identical or similar objects, applied in various simulations and other studies of urban environments. We believe that this technology is still a widely unexplored ground and that it will prove itself as a very important tool in the reconstruction process. In this paper we sketch how inverse procedural modeling can be applied in the urban modeling field.