TOBAGO — a topology builder for the automated generation of building models

Abstract

We present in this article a strategy and methodology for an efficient generation of even fairly complex building models. Within this concept we request the operator to measure the house roofs from a stereomodel in form of an unstructured point cloud. According to our experience this can be done very quickly. In a second step we fit generic building models fully automatically to these point clouds. The structure information is inherently included in these building models. In such a way geometric, topologic and even semantic data can be handed over to a CAD-system, in our case AutoCad, for further visualization and manipulation.

The structuring is achieved in three steps. In a first step a classifier is initiated which recognizes the class of houses a particular roof point cloud belongs to. This recognition step is primarily based on the analysis of the number of ridge points. In the second and third step the concrete topological relations between roof points are investigated and generic building models are fitted to the point clouds. Based on the technique of constraint-based reasoning two geometrical parsers are solving this problem.

We have tested the methodology under a variety of different conditions in several pilot projects. The results will indicate the good performance of our approach. In addition we will demonstrate how the results can be used for visualization (texture mapping) and animation (walk-throughs and fly-overs).