Abstract
We present a novel and robust method for modeling cities from 3D-point data. Our algorithm provides a more complete description than existing approaches by reconstructing simultaneously buildings, trees and topologically complex grounds. A major contribution of our work is the original way of modeling buildings which guarantees a high generalization level while having semantized and compact representations. Geometric 3D-primitives such as planes, cylinders, spheres or cones describe regular roof sections, and are combined with mesh-patches that represent irregular roof components. The various urban components interact through a non-convex energy minimization problem in which they are propagated under arrangement constraints over a planimetric map. Our approach is experimentally validated on complex buildings and large urban scenes of millions of points, and is compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Agarwal, S., Snavely, N., Simon, I., Seitz, S., & Szeliski, R. (2009). Building Rome in a day. In ICCV, Kyoto, Japan.
Baillard, C., & Zisserman, A. (1999). Automatic reconstruction of piecewise planar models from multiple views. In CVPR, Los Alamitos, US.
Banno, A., Masuda, T., Oishi, T., & Ikeuchi, K. (2008). Flying laser range sensor for large-scale site-modeling and its applications in Bayon digital archival project. International Journal of Computer Vision, 78(2–3), 207–222.
Boykov, Y., Veksler, O., & Zabih, R. (2001). Fast approximate energy minimization via graph cuts. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 23(11), 1124–1137.
Briese, C., Pfeifer, N., & Dorninger, P. (2002). Applications of the robust interpolation for DTM determination. In PCV, Graz, Austria.
Carlberg, M., Gao, P., Chen, G., & Zakhor, A. (2009). Classifying urban landscape in aerial lidar using 3d shape analysis. In ICIP, Cairo, Egypt.
CGAL (2011). www.cgal.org.
Chauve, A.-L., Labatut, P., & Pons, J.-P. (2010). Robust piecewise-planar 3D reconstruction and completion from large-scale unstructured point data. In CVPR, San Francisco, US.
Chen, J., & Chen, B. (2008). Architectural modeling from sparsely scanned range data. International Journal of Computer Vision, 78(2–3), 223–236.
Coughlan, J. M., & Yuille, A. L. (2000). The Manhattan world assumption: Regularities in scene statistics which enable Bayesian inference. In NIPS, Denver, US.
Dick, A., Torr, P., & Cipolla, R. (2004). Modelling and interpretation of architecture from several images. International Journal of Computer Vision, 60(2), 111–134.
Frahm, J.-M., et al. (2010). Building Rome on a cloudless day. In ECCV, Hersonissos, Greece.
Frueh, C., & Zakhor, A. (2004). An automated method for large-scale, ground-based city model acquisition. International Journal of Computer Vision, 60(1), 5–24.
Furukawa, Y., Curless, B., Seitz, S., & Szeliski, R. (2009). Manhattan-world stereo. In CVPR, Miami, US.
Furukawa, Y., Curless, B., Seitz, S., & Szeliski, R. (2010). Towards internet-scale multi-view stereo. In CVPR, San Francisco, US.
Gallup, D., Frahm, J., & Pollefeys, M. (2010). Piecewise planar and non-planar stereo for urban scene reconstruction. In CVPR, San Francisco, US.
Garland, M., & Heckbert, P. (1997). Surface simplification using quadric error metrics. In SIGGRAPH, Los Angeles, US.
Golovinskiy, A., Kim, V., & Funkhouser, T. (2009). Shape-based recognition of 3D point clouds in urban environments. In ICCV, Kyoto, Japan.
Haala, N., & Kada, M. (2010). An update on automatic 3D building reconstruction. Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 65(6).
Han, F., Tu, Z. W., & Zhu, S. C. (2004). Range image segmentation by an effective jump-diffusion method. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 26(9), 1138–1153.
Lafarge, F., Descombes, X., Zerubia, J., & Pierrot-Deseilligny, M. (2010a). Structural approach for building reconstruction from a single DSM. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 32(1), 135–147.
Lafarge, F., Keriven, R., Bredif, M., & Vu, H. (2010b). Hybrid multi-view reconstruction by jump-diffusion. In CVPR, San Francisco, US.
Lafarge, F., & Mallet, C. (2011). Building large urban environments from unstructured point data. In ICCV, Barcelona, Spain.
Leberl, F., Irschara, A., Pock, T., Meixner, P., Gruber, M., Scholz, S., & Wiechert, A. (2010). Point clouds: Lidar versus 3d vision. Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing, 76(10), 1123–1134.
Li, S. (2001). Markov random field modeling in image analysis. Berlin: Springer.
Mallet, C., & Bretar, F. (2009). Full-waveform topographic lidar: state-of-the-art. Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 64(1), 1–16.
Marshall, D., Lukacs, G., & Martin, R. (2001). Robust segmentation of primitives from range data in the presence of geometric degeneracy. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 23(3), 304–314.
Matei, B., Sawhney, H., Samarasekera, S., Kim, J., & Kumar, R. (2008). Building segmentation for densely built urban regions using aerial lidar data. In CVPR, Anchorage, US.
Mayer, H. (2008). Object extraction in photogrammetric computer vision. Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 63(2), 213–222.
Muller, P., Wonka, P., Haegler, S., Ulmer, A., & Van Gool, L. (2006). Procedural modeling of buildings. In SIGGRAPH, Boston.
Munoz, D., Bagnell, J. A., Vandapel, N., & Hebert, M. (2009). Contextual classification with functional max-margin Markov networks. In CVPR, Miami, US.
Pollefeys, M., et al. (2008). Detailed real-time urban 3D reconstruction from video. International Journal of Computer Vision, 78(2–3), 143–167.
Poullis, C., & You, S. (2009). Automatic reconstruction of cities from remote sensor data. In CVPR, Miami, US.
Schnabel, R., Wahl, R., & Klein, R. (2007). Efficient RANSAC for point-cloud shape detection. Computer Graphics Forum, 26(2), 214–226.
Sinha, S. N., Steedly, D., & Szeliski, R. (2009). Piecewise planar stereo for image-based rendering. In ICCV, Kyoto, Japan.
Strecha, C., Von Hansen, W., Van Gool, L., Fua, P., & Thoennessen, U. (2008). On benchmarking camera calibration and multi-view stereo for high resolution imagery. In CVPR, Anchorage, US.
Toshev, A., Mordohai, P., & Taskar, B. (2010). Detecting and parsing architecture at city scale from range data. In CVPR, San Francisco, US.
Tse, R., Gold, C., & Kidner, D. (2007). Using the Delaunay triangulation/Voronoi diagram to extract building information from raw lidar data. In Proc. of international symposium on Voronoi diagrams in science and engineering, Urumchi, China.
Vanegas, C., Aliaga, D., & Benes, B. (2010). Building reconstruction using Manhattan-world grammars. In CVPR, San Francisco, US.
Vosselman, G., Kessels, P., & Gorte, B. (2005). The utilisation of airborne laser scanning for mapping. International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation, 6(3–4).
Vu, H., Keriven, R., Labatut, P., & Pons, J. (2009). Towards high-resolution large-scale multiview. In CVPR, Miami, US.
Weiss, Y., & Freeman, W. (2001). On the optimality of solutions of the max-product belief propagation algorithm in arbitrary graphs. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 47(2), 736–744.
Xu, G., & Zhang, Z. (1996). Epipolar geometry in stereo, motion and object recognition. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Xu, H., Gossett, N., & Chen, B. (2007). Knowledge and heuristic-based modeling of laser-scanned trees. Trans. on Graphics, 26(4).
Zebedin, L., Bauer, J., Karner, K., & Bischof, H. (2008). Fusion of feature- and area-based information for urban buildings modeling from aerial imagery. In ECCV, Marseille, France.
Zhou, Q., & Neumann, U. (2010). 2.5d dual contouring: A robust approach to creating building models from aerial lidar point clouds. In ECCV, Hersonissos, Greece.
Zhu, Z., & Kanade, T. (2008). Special issue on modeling and representations of large-scale 3D scenes. International Journal of Computer Vision, 78(2–3).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Lafarge, F., Mallet, C. Creating Large-Scale City Models from 3D-Point Clouds: A Robust Approach with Hybrid Representation. Int J Comput Vis 99, 69–85 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-012-0517-8
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-012-0517-8