An Interactive System for Producing Polyhedral and Prismatic Building Models Using Building Outline Segments

This paper presents an interactive system for producing polyhedral and prismatic building models. The core technology, called “Split-Merge-Shape” (SMS) method, reconstruct building models from photogrammetric 3-D line-segments of buildings, i.e. the roof-edges. The method may treat those complete line-segments as well as partial line-segments due to image occlusions. The proposed method comprises four major parts: (1) initialization of a building model and pre-processing of 3-D line-segments, (2) splitting the model by 3-D line-segments to construct a combination of roof-primitives, (3) merging those connected roof-primitives to complete the boundary of each building, and (4) shaping each building rooftop by coplanar fitting. The SPLIT and MERGE processes sequentially reconstruct the topology between any roof edges of the buildings and then reform them as enclosed regions. The SHAPE process uses height information to determine the shapes and heights of the roofs. The results are the polyhedral building models. For most of the 3-D GIS applications the prismatic building models is preferred. So, after modelling the polyhedral building models, prismatic building models can also be created by using an interactive procedure. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method can soundly rebuild the topology among those 3-D line-segments and reconstruct the building models with up to 98% of successful rate. The other 2% of SHAPE failure can be recovered interactively. The proposed system based on the SMS technology can achieve high reliability with high degree of automation even groups of connected buildings and complex buildings are processed. The proposed SMS method can simplify the work of topographic mapping for buildings, and integrated with threedimensional building modelling thus reducing the operational costs dramatically.