Automatic Integration of Facade Textures into 3D Building Models

Visualization of city scenes is important for many applications including entertainment and urban mission planning. Models covering wide areas can be efficiently constructed from aerial images. However, only roof details are visible from aerial views; ground views are needed to provide details of the building facades for high quality ’fly-through’ visualization or simulation applications. We present an automatic method of integrating facade textures from ground view images into 3D building models for urban site modeling. We first segment the input image into building facade regions using a hybrid feature extraction method, which combines global feature extraction with Hough transform on an adaptively tessellated Gaussian Sphere and local region segmentation. We estimate the external camera parameters by using the corner points of the extracted facade regions to integrate the facade textures into the 3D building models. We validate our approach with a set of experiments on some urban sites.