Automatic 3d Building Reconstruction from Dems : an Application to Pleiades Simulations

This paper is about an example of PLEIADES applications, the 3D building reconstruction. The future PLEIADES satellites are especially well adapted to deal with 3D building reconstruction through the sub-metric resolution of images and its stereoscopic characteristics. We propose a fully automatic 3D-city model of dense urban areas using a parametric approach. First, a Digital Elevation Model (DEM) is generated using an algorithm based on a maximum-flow formulation using three views. Then, building footprints are extracted from the DEM through an automatic method based on marked point processes : they are represented by an association of rectangles that we regularize by improving the connection of the neighboring rectangles and the facade discontinuity detection. Finally, a 3D-reconstruction method based on a skeleton process which allows to model the rooftops is proposed from the DEM and the building footprints. The different building heights constitute parameters which are estimated and then regularized by the ”K-means” algorithm including an entropy term.