Automated Architecture Reconstruction from Close-range Photogrammetry∗

We describe a method of automated reconstruction of buildings from a set of uncalibrated photographs. The method proceeds in two steps (i) Recovering the camera corresponding to each photograph and a set of sparse scene features using uncalibrated structure from motion techniques developed in the Computer Vision community. (ii) A novel plane-sweep algorithm which progressively constructs a piecewise planar 3D model of the building. In both steps, the rich geometric constraints present in architectural scenes are utilized. It is also demonstrated that window indentations may be computed automatically. The methods are illustrated on an image triplet of a college court at Oxford, and on the CIPA reference image set of Zurich City Hall.