A Full Level-of-Detail Specification for 3D Building Models Combining Indoor and Outdoor Scenes

The level of detail (LoD) concept in CityGML (City Geography Markup Language), which indicates how closely the model mirrors its real-world counterpart, has been accepted and applied widely in various applications, including the 3D modeling of buildings. However, with an increasing number of human activities occurring in the indoor environment, the standardized LoD definition appears to be insufficient because of its narrow classifications for interior features, which can be presented only in LoD4. In view of this drawback, an extended indoor LoD (ILoD) specification is proposed, particularly for indoor spaces, allowing the existing LoD to become a more precise outdoor LoD (OLoD) by exploiting the advantages of two other international standards: Industry foundation classes (IFC) and IndoorGML. In this paper, the interior space is divided into distinct systems of three semantic aspects (structure, connectivity, and volume); the approach can be considered the guiding ideology to define the detailed indoor levels following a concrete theoretical realization based on extending the UML diagram of CityGML’s building model. Moreover, a continuous and seamless full LoD (FLoD) set obtained by combining various OLoDs and ILoDs is subsequently listed to realize the full specification for 3D building models. Furthermore, to demonstrate the proposed specification and prove the applicability of the building model at different LoDs, a practical experiment is conducted.