Alignment of 3D Building Models and TIR Video Sequences with Line Tracking

Abstract. Thermal infrared imagery of urban areas became interesting for urban climate investigations and thermal building inspections. Using a flying platform such as UAV or a helicopter for the acquisition and combining the thermal data with the 3D building models via texturing delivers a valuable groundwork for large-area building inspections. However, such thermal textures are useful for further analysis if they are geometrically correctly extracted. This can be achieved with a good coregistrations between the 3D building models and thermal images, which cannot be achieved by direct georeferencing. Hence, this paper presents methodology for alignment of 3D building models and oblique TIR image sequences taken from a flying platform. In a single image line correspondences between model edges and image line segments are found using accumulator approach and based on these correspondences an optimal camera pose is calculated to ensure the best match between the projected model and the image structures. Among the sequence the linear features are tracked based on visibility prediction. The results of the proposed methodology are presented using a TIR image sequence taken from helicopter in a densely built-up urban area. The novelty of this work is given by employing the uncertainty of the 3D building models and by innovative tracking strategy based on a priori knowledge from the 3D building model and the visibility checking.