Wide-area Scene Reconstruction with Polyhedral Buildings featuring Recognized Regularities

Abstract. The modeling of buildings suffers from a dichotomy between generic and specific representations: the lack of domain knowledge in flexible models that can represent many shapes, and the restricted geometry of pre-specified parametric building primitives. To fill this gap, we propose using general boundary representations enriched with automatically recognized and enforced geometric constraints derived from human-made regularities. The proposed reasoning process relies on the statistics of the planar point groups extracted from airborne-captured point clouds. Hence, a chosen significance level is the only process parameter. To enforce the creation of sound solids, we apply manifold constraints for the generation of the boundary representations. The feasibility and usability of the approach are demonstrated by evaluating an airborne-captured laser scan containing approximately 7,600 buildings over an area of 50 km² featuring both inner-city and rural landscapes.