Abstract: The digital twin city seeks to restore the urban scene that is close to the reality and provides immersive experience based on the completeness of the urban entity. Natural scene plays an important role in urban scenes. However, natural scene construction faces many challenges due to its diverse types, complex structure and indeterminate location of the scene components. With the development of digital twin city, natural scene construction requires not only high-quality 3D models of scene components but also their ecological characteristics such as growth processes, structural compositions and distribution rules in the natural environment to cope with scene simulations at different scales. Moreover, these structural-functional models result in an in-depth scene visualization that facilitate both better spatial cognition and immersive experience. This paper identifies the key issues of natural scene construction from the perspective of the scene construction process, reviews the relevant, state-of-art techniques and methods of 3D scene construction, and further proposes a natural scene construction framework for digital twin city.

Key words: natural scene construction, digital twin cities, 3D reconstruction, modelling and visualization