Abstract
Information Technology has recently been introduced to various social systems. Especially, important information for our living like a road map has been brought by Geographic Information Systems. Particularly, a 3-D road map is a strong concern of map-producing industries because of its visual understandability in car navigation. Although there are researches on the development of 3-D road maps, most of them employ aerial views obtained from an airplane or a satellite. They cannot offer an exact 3-D road map, since certain road information cannot be observed from above. This paper proposes a novel technique for creating a 3-D road map. It includes proposal of a vehicle that collects ground-view information of a road environment and a graphic system for producing a 3-D road map employing the collected information. The function of the proposed technique is to make a 3-D map by fitting measured data to a given 2-D map. In order to evaluate the proposed technique, we performed experiments at several cities in the world, and produced highly realistic 3-D graphical maps of the road environment. This confirms the availability of the proposed technique.
