Towards Fully Automatic Generation of City Models

Once thought of being useful primarily for planning the location of telecommunication antennas, it has become clear in the meantime that three-dimensional city models are of importance in their own right. This paper presents some of our latest results on the reconstruction of building models from laser scanning DSM’s and digital ground plans. First, we show how buildings can be reconstructed from ground plans and generalize the standard straight skeleton algorithm. In a second step, we introduce the information which can be obtained from DSM segmentation in order to recover building structures which cannot be inferred directly from the ground plan. The work presented in this paper is actually part of our larger ATOP approach, a new framework for the fully automatic generation of city models.