3d Reconstruction of Building Models

This paper describes a knowledge-based approach to automatic 3D reconstruction of buildings from aerial imagery. The approach relies upon the use of 2D GIS map and knowledge about the imaging geometry and acquisition parameters. We show that by integrating knowledge from the images and the GIS map, the complexity of the building reconstruction process can be greatly reduced. In the first stage the buildings are localized in the images based on information about the ground planes of the buildings contained in the GIS map. This restricts the processing at all following stages to one building structure. Further, a building can be partitioned into more simple building parts, corresponding to some basic building models. By merging the separately reconstructed building parts the initial building model is found. The building reconstruction process is described as a tree search in the space of possible building hypotheses.