TRIANGULAR MESH APPROACH FOR AUTOMATIC REPAIR OF MISSING SURFACES OF LOD2 BUILDING MODELS

3D city models are increasingly being used to represent the complexity of today’s urban areas, as they aid in understanding how different aspects of a city can function. For instance, several municipalities and governmental organisations have constructed their 3D city models for various purposes. These 3D models, which are normally complex and contain semantics information, have typically been used for visualisation and visual analysis purposes. However, most of the available 3D models open datasets contain many geometric and topological errors, e.g., missing surfaces (holes), self-intersecting surfaces, duplicate vertices, etc. These errors prevent the datasets from being used for advanced applications such as 3D spatial analysis which requires valid datasets and topology to calculate its volume, detect surface orientation, area calculation, etc. Therefore, certain repairs must be done before taking these models into actual applications, and hole-filling (of missing surfaces) is an important one among them. Several studies on the topic of automatic repair of the 3D model have been conducted by various researchers, with different approaches have been developed. Thus, this paper describes a triangular mesh approach for automatically repair invalid (missing surfaces) 3D building model (LOD2). The developed approach demonstrates an ability to repair missing surfaces (with holes) in a 3D building model by reconstructing geometries of the holes of the affected model. The repaired model is validated and produced a closed-two manifold model.

Parameter-Free Half-Spaces Based 3D Building Reconstruction Using Ground and Segmented Building Points from Airborne LiDAR Data with 2D Outlines

This paper aims to automatically reconstruct 3D building models on a large scale using a new approach on the basis of half-spaces, while making no assumptions about the building layout and keeping the number of input parameters to a minimum. The proposed algorithm is performed in two stages. First, the airborne LiDAR data and buildings’ outlines are preprocessed to generate buildings’ base models and the corresponding half-spaces. In the second stage, the half-spaces are analysed and used for shaping the final 3D building model using 3D Boolean operations. In experiments, the proposed algorithm was applied on a large scale, and its’ performance was inspected on a city level and on a single building level. Accurate reconstruction of buildings with various layouts were demonstrated and limitations were identified for large-scale applications. Finally, the proposed algorithm was validated on an ISPRS benchmark dataset, where a RMSE of 1.31 m and completeness of 98.9 % were obtained.

EVALUATION OF 3D BUILDING MODEL USING TERRESTRIAL LASER SCANNING AND DRONE PHOTOGRAMMETRY

The objective of our study is the evaluation of the 3D modeling of buildings and the extraction of structural elements from point clouds obtained using two acquisition techniques (drone and terrestrial laser scanner), as well as the evaluation of the usefulness of their integration. The drone shooting mission was carried using the DJI Phantom 3 Professional and the Sony EXMOR 1/2.3" CMOS RGB camera. For the TLS scanning mission, 9 scanning stations were performed using the FARO Focus S350 laser scanner.To allow the fusion of the two point clouds obtained from drone imagery and TLS, an alignment step is applied. This step was performed using the Iterative Closest Point algorithm. Segmentation was performed using the adapted RANSAC algorithm on point clouds obtained from the drone mission and the TLS mission as well as on the merged point cloud in order to extract structural elements of the building such as windows, doors and stairs. Analysis of the results emphasizes the importance of TLS and drone in 3D modeling. TLS gave better results than the drone in extracting structural elements. This work confirms the importance of complementarity between these two technologies to produce detailed, complete and precise 3D models.

Use of topographic LiDAR point clouds for building reconstruction

Demand for three-dimensional (3D) urban models keeps growing in various civil and military applications. Topographic LiDAR systems are capable of acquiring elevation data directly over terrain features. However, the task of creating a large-scale virtual environment still remains a time-consuming and manual work. In this thesis a method for 3D building reconstruction, consisting of building roof detection, roof outline extraction and regularization, and 3D building model generation, directly from LiDAR point clouds is developed. In the proposed approach, a new algorithm called Gaussian Markov Random Field (GMRF) and Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is used to segment point clouds for building roof detection. The modified convex hull (MCH) algorithm is used for the extraction of roof outlines followed by the regularization of the extracted outlines using the modified hierarchical regularization algorithm. Finally, 3D building models are generated in an ArcGIS environment. The results obtained demonstrate the effectiveness and satisfactory accuracy of the developed method.

Use of topographic LiDAR point clouds for building reconstruction

Demand for three-dimensional (3D) urban models keeps growing in various civil and military applications. Topographic LiDAR systems are capable of acquiring elevation data directly over terrain features. However, the task of creating a large-scale virtual environment still remains a time-consuming and manual work. In this thesis a method for 3D building reconstruction, consisting of building roof detection, roof outline extraction and regularization, and 3D building model generation, directly from LiDAR point clouds is developed. In the proposed approach, a new algorithm called Gaussian Markov Random Field (GMRF) and Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is used to segment point clouds for building roof detection. The modified convex hull (MCH) algorithm is used for the extraction of roof outlines followed by the regularization of the extracted outlines using the modified hierarchical regularization algorithm. Finally, 3D building models are generated in an ArcGIS environment. The results obtained demonstrate the effectiveness and satisfactory accuracy of the developed method.

Combined Rule-Based and Hypothesis-Based Method for Building Model Reconstruction from Photogrammetric Point Clouds

Three-dimensional (3D) building models play an important role in digital cities and have numerous potential applications in environmental studies. In recent years, the photogrammetric point clouds obtained by aerial oblique images have become a major source of data for 3D building reconstruction. Aiming at reconstructing a 3D building model at Level of Detail (LoD) 2 and even LoD3 with preferred geometry accuracy and affordable computation expense, in this paper, we propose a novel method for the efficient reconstruction of building models from the photogrammetric point clouds which combines the rule-based and the hypothesis-based method using a two-stage topological recovery process. Given the point clouds of a single building, planar primitives and their corresponding boundaries are extracted and regularized to obtain abstracted building counters. In the first stage, we take advantage of the regularity and adjacency of the building counters to recover parts of the topological relationships between different primitives. Three constraints, namely pairwise constraint, triplet constraint, and nearby constraint, are utilized to form an initial reconstruction with candidate faces in ambiguous areas. In the second stage, the topologies in ambiguous areas are removed and reconstructed by solving an integer linear optimization problem based on the initial constraints while considering data fitting degree. Experiments using real datasets reveal that compared with state-of-the-art methods, the proposed method can efficiently reconstruct 3D building models in seconds with the geometry accuracy in decimeter level.

POST-EARTHQUAKE 3D BUILDING MODEL (LOD2) GENERATION FROM UAS IMAGERY: THE CASE OF VRISA TRADITIONAL SETTLEMENT, LESVOS, GREECE

In recent years 3D building modelling techniques are commonly used in various domains such as navigation, urban planning and disaster management, mostly confined to visualization purposes. The 3D building models are produced at various Levels of Detail (LOD) in the CityGML standard, that not only visualize complex urban environment but also allows queries and analysis. The aim of this paper is to present the methodology and the results of the comparison among two scenarios of LOD2 building models, which have been generated by the derivate UAS data acquired from two flight campaigns in different altitudes. The study was applied in Vrisa traditional settlement, Lesvos island, Greece, which was affected by a devastating earthquake of Mw = 6.3 on 12th June 2017. Specifically, the two scenarios were created by the results that were derived from two different flight campaigns which were: i) on 12th January 2020 with a flying altitude of 100 m and ii) on 4th February 2020 with a flying altitude of 40 m, both with a nadir camera position. The LOD2 buildings were generated in a part of Vrisa settlement consisted of 80 buildings using the footprints of the buildings, Digital Surface Models (DSMs), a Digital Elevation Model (DEM) and orthophoto maps of the area. Afterwards, a comparison was implemented between the LOD2 buildings of the two different scenarios, with their volumes and their heights. Subsequently, the heights of the LOD2 buildings were compared with the heights of the respective terrestrial laser scanner (TLS) models. Additionally, the roofs of the LOD2 buildings were evaluated through visual inspections. The results showed that the 65 of 80 LOD2 buildings were generated accurately in terms of their heights and roof types for the first scenario and 64 for the second respectively. Finally, the comparison of the results proved that the generation of post-earthquake LOD2 buildings can be achieved with the appropriate UAS data acquired at a flying altitude of 100 m and they are not affected significantly by a lower one altitude.

EXPLORATION OF OPEN DATA IN SOUTHEAST ASIA TO GENERATE 3D BUILDING MODELS

This article investigates the current status of generating 3D building models across 11 countries in Southeast Asia from publicly available data, primarily volunteered geoinformation (OpenStreetMap). The following countries are analysed: Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Timor-Leste, and Vietnam. This cross-country study includes multiple spatial levels of analysis: country, town, and micro-level (smaller neighbourhood). The main finding is that authoritative data to generate 3D building models is almost non-existent while building completeness in OpenStreetMap is highly heterogeneous, yielding location-dependent conclusions. While in general just a fraction of mapped buildings has height information and none of the administrative areas provides sufficient information to generate 3D building models, on a micro-level some areas are fully complete, providing a high potential to generate 3D building models on a precinct scale, which may be useful for certain spatial analyses. Furthermore, some areas have high building completeness, requiring only half of the work necessary for the extrusion: the collection of building height attributes. As a part of this work, a semantic 3D building model of a selected set of buildings in Singapore has been generated and released as open data (CityJSON), and the developed code was open-sourced.