Modeling of Urban Scenes by Aerial Photographs and Simply Reconstructed Buildings

In many fields such as city administration and facilities management, there are increasing requests for a Geographic Information Systein (GIs) that provides automated mapping functions to users. Especially, some mechanism for displaying 3D views of an urban scene is eagerly expected because it allows construction of an intuitive and understandable environment for managing objects in the scene. In this paper, we present a new urban modeling system utilizing both vision and image-based approaches. Our method is based on a new concept that the wide urban area should be displayed with natural photographs, and each object in the area should be identified by its figure projected on the view. The users of the system can enjoy an intuitive understanding of the area and easy identification of the target, which have been accomplished by generating natural views a t any viewpoints and reconstructing shapes of objects suitably.