Automatic Modeling of Planar-Hinged Buildings

Abstract

We present a framework to automatically model and reconstruct buildings in a dense urban area. Our method is robust to noise and recovers planar features and sharp edges, producing a water-tight triangulation suitable for texture mapping and interactive rendering. Building and architectural priors, such as the Manhattan world and Atlanta world assumptions, have been used to improve the quality of reconstructions. We extend the framework to include buildings consisting of arbitrary planar faces interconnected by hinges. Given millions of initial 3D points and normals (i.e., via an image-based reconstruction), we estimate the location and properties of the building model hinges and planar segments. Then, starting with a closed Poisson triangulation, we use an energy-based metric to iteratively refine the initial model so as to attempt to recover the planar-hinged model and maintain building details where possible. Our results include automatically reconstructing a variety of buildings spanning a large and dense urban area, comparisons, and analysis of our method. The end product is an automatic method to produce watertight models that are very suitable for 3D city modeling and computer graphics applications.