City-Scale Modeling for Street Navigation

This paper proposes a semi-automatic image-based approach for 3-dimensional (3D) modeling of buildings along streets. Image-based urban 3D modeling techniques are typically based on the use of aerial and ground-level images. The aerial image of the relevant area is extracted from publically available sources in Google Maps by stitching together different patches of the map. Panoramic images are common for ground-level recording because they have advantages for 3D modeling. A panoramic video recorder is used in the proposed approach for recording sequences of ground-level spherical panoramic images. The proposed approach has two advantages. First, detected camera trajectories are more accurate and stable (compared to methods using multi-view planar images only) due to the use of spherical panoramic images. Second, we extract the texture of a facade of a building from a single panoramic image. Thus, there is no need to deal with color blending problems that typically occur when using overlapping textures.