Interactive Image-based Urban Modelling

In this paper we describe a novel interactive modelling technique, which allows the non-expert user to create plausible models of urban scenes with 2D image operations only. This technique may be treated as an enhancement of the famous image based modelling and photo editing (IBPE) (Oh et al., 2001) approach towards more automation and ease to use. The are several contributions in this paper. First, we propose a method for automatic correction of camera pitch and roll for urban scene photographs, which simplifies the building segmentation, camera pose estimation for multi-view modelling and allows to reconstruct building walls from limited information. Second, we have developed a set of automated tools for building boundary specification that relies on simple user operations. Third, have extended the vertical polygons modelling methods from IBPE for the case when the contact line of the building and ground is heavily occluded or unreliable and proposed several algorithms for automating the process. Finally, we extend this modelling approach to modelling from several viewpoints.