Robust Reconstruction of Building Models from Three-Dimensional Line Segments

tor has to estimate the location of hidden corners from the conThis paper presents a novel method for semi-automatically jugate images. This procedure is tedious and inefficient and constructing building models from photogrammetric 3D line has a limited accuracy, especially for connected buildings in segments of buildings, i.e., their roof edges. The method, which densely built-up areas. we call “Split-Merge-Shape” (SMS), can treat both complete Weidner (1997), Haala and Brenner (1998), and Brenner line segments as well as incomplete line segments due to image (2000) proposed the use of digital surface models (DSMS )t o reocclusions. The proposed method is comprised of five major construct 3D building models. The DSM data can be generated parts: (1) the creation of the Region of Interest (ROI) and pre- automatically using stereo-pairs, or can be obtained from airprocessing, (2) splitting the model by using the 3D line seg- borne laser scanning (Lohr, 1996). The problem is that precise ments to construct a combination of roof primitives, (3) merging buildingboundaries cannotbewell defineddue tothesegmenconnected roof primitives to complete the boundary of each tation of DSMS. Therefore, other complementary data, such as building, (4) shaping each building rooftop by connected ground plans of the building outlines, are necessary to assure coplanar analysis and coplanar fitting, and (5) quality assur- the reconstruction. This limits the practicability of the ance. The experimental results indicate that the proposed approach. method can soundly rebuild the topology from the 3D line In order to increase efficiency, Fischer et al. (1998) and segments and reconstruct building models with up to a 98