The Urban Observatory (UO) at the NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) collects terabytes of image data of New York City-scapes from various vantage points in Manhattan and Brooklyn in order to gain insights into patterns of energy consumption and pollution along with other urban phenomena.However, these image data are of limited analytical use without integrating additional information about the objects one can observe in an image, for instance their geographic location or zoning characteristics. Projecting the geospatial data contained in the three-dimensional (3-D) building model of NYC onto a UO image unlocks wealth of information about the buildings seen in the image, such as the building identification number (BIN) and height. Extracting the BINs would also allow us to merge the UO image data with additional NYC datasets for further analysis, for instance land use data from MapPLUTO as well as socioeconomic and demographic data from the U.S. Census. The goal of this project is to produce a generalizable script that would project the 3-D building model data onto an image captured by the UO, using photogrammetry and ray tracing techniques.
- Image - Inside the data folder
- 3D Data - http://www1.nyc.gov/site/doitt/initiatives/3d-building.page