SUMMARY This paper presents a method for building roof contours extraction from high-resolution aerial imagery taken over complex urban scenes. The proposed method is based on the optimization of a snakes energy function that represents building roof contours in the image-space digital reference system by using the dynamic programming technique. Formally, snakes (or active contour models) are p...

Building energy models usually employ a constant, room-temperature-measured value for the thermal resistance of fiberglass roof insulation. In summer, however, the mean temperature of roof insulation can rise significantly above room temperature, lowering the insulation’s thermal resistance by 10% to 20%. Though the temperature dependence of the thermal resistance of porous materials like fiber...

Modelling Large Urban Environments using traditional modelling techniques would prove too time consuming a process. Consequently a method is required for generating large urban environments quickly without requiring a labour intensive process or expensive data. Some approaches to resolve this problem have been undertaken through the use of procedural modelling or statistics. However the test su...

Three-dimensional (3D) building models are essential for 3D Geographic Information Systems and play an important role in various urban management applications. Although several light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data-based reconstruction approaches have made significant advances toward the fully automatic generation of 3D building models, the process is still tedious and time-consuming, especi...

Abstract: In this paper, an algorithm is proposed for automatically generating three-dimensional (3D) building models in dense urban areas. Automatic 3D building modeling in dense urban areas is challenging because, especially in Japan, houses that have slant roofs are located close to each other, and their heights are similar. For this case, difficulty in separating point clouds into individua...

Existing automatic building extraction methods are not effective in extracting buildings which are small in size and have transparent roofs. The application of large area threshold prohibits detection of small buildings and the use of ground points in generating the building mask prevents detection of transparent buildings. In addition, the existing methods use numerous parameters to extract bu...

The identification and representation of building roof topology are basic, but important, issues for 3D building model reconstruction from point clouds. Always, the roof topology is expressed by the roof topology graph (RTG), which stores the plane–plane adjacencies as graph edges. As the decision of the graph edges is often based on local statistics between adjacent planes, topology errors can...

Over the last 20 years the demand for three dimensional (3D) building models has resulted in a vast amount of research being conducted in attempts to automate the extraction and reconstruction of models from airborne sensors. Recent results have shown that current methods tend to favour planar fitting procedures from lidar data, which are able to successfully reconstruct simple roof structures ...

Accurate 3D surface models in urban areas are essential for a variety of applications, such as visualization, GIS, and mobile communications. Since manual surface reconstruction is very costly and time consuming, the development of automated algorithms is of great importance. On the other hand LIDAR data is a relatively new technology for obtaining Digital Surface Models (DSM) of the earth’s su...