Occlusion-free 3d Realistic Modelling of Buildings in Urban Areas

Currently the creation of textures for construction of Visually Realistic Models (VRMs) of buildings is a time consuming manual process involving the use of a number of separate software applications and substantial skill by the user. This paper presents the development of a novel procedure for the semi-automatic construction of textures, which makes use of a Charge Coupled Device (CCD) camera mounted on a motor-driven theodolite to acquire a digital texture database. The images are indexed using the angular horizontal and vertical readings from the theodolite. Given the coordinates of a building façade, an Automatic Texture Processing Tool (ATPT) finds the corresponding images covering the face and forms its texture. The system suggested here is substantially faster and easier to use compared the current methods available in the market. In addition, it can be used to easily merge textures of the same face in order to remove undesirable occlusions from textures.