Urban scene modeling from airborne data

Analysis and 3D reconstruction of urban scenes from physical measurements is a fundamental problem in computer vision and geometry processing. Within the last decades, an important demand arises for automatic methods generating urban scenes representations. This thesis investigates the design of pipelines for solving the complex problem of reconstructing 3D urban elements from either aerial Lidar data or Multi-View Stereo (MVS) meshes. Our approaches generate accurate and compact mesh representations enriched with urban-related semantic labeling. In urban scene reconstruction, two important steps are necessary: an identi cation of the di erent elements of the scenes, and a representation of these elements with 3D meshes. Chapter 2 presents two classi cation methods which yield to a segmentation of the scene into semantic classes of interests. The bene t is twofold. First, this brings awareness of the scene for better understanding. Second, di erent reconstruction strategies are adopted for each type of urban elements. Our idea of inserting both semantical and structural information within urban scenes is discussed and validated through experiments. In Chapter 3, a top-down approach to detect `Vegetation' elements from Lidar data is proposed using Marked Point Processes and a novel optimization method. In Chapter 4, bottom-up approaches are presented reconstructing `Building' elements from Lidar data and from MVS meshes. Experiments on complex urban structures illustrate the robustness and scalability of our systems.