Topological Reconstruction of Complex 3D Buildings and Automatic Extraction of Levels of Detail

Abstract

This paper describes a new method allowing to retrieve the indoor and outdoor topology of a detailed 3D building model from its geometry and to extract different levels of detail (LoD) from the resulting topological description. No prior information about the initial model, except its geometric information is needed as input, and using the combinatorial maps data structure, the method recovers the topological information of the identified parts of the building. The topology is needed for most of the applications using 3D building models after the architects design it. While classical models available are mainly furnished in a Boundary Representation (B-Rep) format, we discuss how to recover the components that allow to distinguish the several parts of the building (defined as volumes) then the spatial relationships linking them.