This paper introduces a fast and efficient segmentation technique for 2D images and 3D point clouds of building facades. Facades of buildings are highly structured and consequently most methods that have been proposed for this problem aim to make use of this strong prior information. Contrary to most prior work, we are describing a system that is almost domain independent and consists of standard segmentation methods. We train a sequence of boosted decision trees using auto-context features. This is learned using stacked generalization. We find that this technique performs better, or comparable with all previous published methods and present empirical results on all available 2D and 3D facade benchmark datasets. The proposed method is simple to implement, easy to extend, and very efficient at test-time inference.
Recently, techniques have been introduced for facade understanding and modeling in 3D @cite_13 @cite_11 . The 3D point cloud or meshes that these methods operate on are constructed using 2D images captured from multiple viewpoints. A standard way to label a 3D mesh or a point cloud, is to label all the overlapping images used for reconstructing the 3D model and then fuse the 2D predictions to obtain a consistently labeled 3D model @cite_18 @cite_31 . The work of @cite_13 proposed a fast technique to segment 3D facade meshes by exploiting the geometry of the reconstructed 3D model. To label a mesh face, their approach selects a single 2D image (from the set of images used for reconstruction) that best captures the semantics. The speed of this technique comes at the cost of performance. The method of @cite_11 implements a three-stage approach to label point clouds of facades directly in 3D. First, features on 3D points are computed and are classified into various semantic classes. Next, facades belonging to different buildings are separated based on previously obtained semantics. Finally, weak architectural rules are applied to enforce structural priors, leading to marginal improvements in performance (0.78 predictions.
@cite_31 @cite_18 @cite_13 @cite_11
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Abstract Frequently, terrestrial LiDAR and image data are used to extract high resolution building geometry like windows, doors and protrusions for three-dimensional (3D) facade reconstruction. However, such a purely data driven bottom-up modelling of facade structures is only feasible if the available observations meet considerable requirements on data quality. Errors in measurement, varying point densities, reduced accuracies, as well as incomplete coverage affect the achievable correctness and reliability of the reconstruction result. While dependence on data quality is a general disadvantage with data driven bottom-up approaches, model based top-down reconstructions are much more robust. Algorithms introduce knowledge about the appearance and arrangement of objects. Thus, they cope with data uncertainty and allow for a procedural modelling of building structures in a predefined architectural style, which is inherent in grammar or model descriptions. We aim at a quality sensitive facade reconstruction which is on the one hand robust against erroneous and incomplete data, but on the other hand not subject to prespecified rules or models. For this purpose, we combine bottom-up and top-down strategies by integrating automatically inferred rules into a data driven reconstruction process. Facade models reconstructed during a bottom-up method serve as a knowledge base for further processing. Dominant or repetitive features and regularities as well as their hierarchical relationship are detected from the modelled facade elements and automatically translated into rules. These rules together with the 3D representations of the modelled facade elements constitute a formal grammar. It holds all the information which is necessary to reconstruct facades in the style of the given building. The paper demonstrates that the proposed algorithm is very flexible towards different data quality and incomplete sensor data. The inferred grammar is used for the verification of the facade model produced during the data driven reconstruction process and the generation of synthetic facades for which only partial or no sensor data is available. Moreover, knowledge propagation is not restricted to facades of one single building. Based on a small set of formal grammars derived from just a few observed buildings, facade reconstruction is also possible for whole districts featuring uniform architectural styles. We present a complete system to semantically decompose and reconstruct 3D models from point clouds. Different than previous urban modeling approaches, our system is designed for residential scenes, which consist of mainly low-rise buildings that do not exhibit the regularity and repetitiveness as high-rise buildings in downtown areas. Our system first automatically labels the input into distinctive categories using supervised learning techniques. Based on the semantic labels, objects in different categories are reconstructed with domain-specific knowledge. In particular, we present a novel building modeling scheme that aims to decompose and fit the building point cloud into basic blocks that are block-wise symmetric and convex. This building representation and its reconstruction algorithm are flexible, efficient, and robust to missing data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system on various datasets and compare our building modeling scheme with other state-of-the-art reconstruction algorithms to show its advantage in terms of both quality and speed. We present a method for fusing two acquisition modes, 2D photographs and 3D LiDAR scans, for depth-layer decomposition of urban facades. The two modes have complementary characteristics: point cloud scans are coherent and inherently 3D, but are often sparse, noisy, and incomplete; photographs, on the other hand, are of high resolution, easy to acquire, and dense, but view-dependent and inherently 2D, lacking critical depth information. In this paper we use photographs to enhance the acquired LiDAR data. Our key observation is that with an initial registration of the 2D and 3D datasets we can decompose the input photographs into rectified depth layers. We decompose the input photographs into rectangular planar fragments and diffuse depth information from the corresponding 3D scan onto the fragments by solving a multi-label assignment problem. Our layer decomposition enables accurate repetition detection in each planar layer, using which we propagate geometry, remove outliers and enhance the 3D scan. Finally, the algorithm produces an enhanced, layered, textured model. We evaluate our algorithm on complex multi-planar building facades, where direct autocorrelation methods for repetition detection fail. We demonstrate how 2D photographs help improve the 3D scans by exploiting data redundancy, and transferring high level structural information to (plausibly) complete large missing regions. We propose a novel approach for the reconstruction of urban structures from 3D point clouds with an assumption of Manhattan World (MW) building geometry; i.e., the predominance of three mutually orthogonal directions in the scene. Our approach works in two steps. First, the input points are classified according to the MW assumption into four local shape types: walls, edges, corners, and edge corners. The classified points are organized into a connected set of clusters from which a volume description is extracted. The MW assumption allows us to robustly identify the fundamental shape types, describe the volumes within the bounding box, and reconstruct visible and occluded parts of the sampled structure. We show results of our reconstruction that has been applied to several synthetic and real-world 3D point data sets of various densities and from multiple viewpoints. Our method automatically reconstructs 3D building models from up to 10 million points in 10 to 60 seconds.