Airborne acquisition and on-road mobile mapping provide complementary 3D information of an urban landscape: the former acquires roof structures, ground, and vegetation at a large scale, but lacks the facade and street-side details, while the latter is incomplete for higher floors and often totally misses out on pedestrian-only areas or undriven districts. In this work, we introduce an approach that efficiently unifies a detailed street-side Structure-from-Motion (SfM) or Multi-View Stereo (MVS) point cloud and a coarser but more complete point cloud from airborne acquisition in a joint surface mesh. We propose a point cloud blending and a volumetric fusion based on ray casting across a 3D tetrahedralization (3DT), extended with data reduction techniques to handle large datasets. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to adopt a 3DT approach for airborne street-side data fusion. Our pipeline exploits typical characteristics of airborne and ground data, and produces a seamless, watertight mesh that is both complete and detailed. Experiments on 3D urban data from multiple sources and different data densities show the effectiveness and benefits of our approach.
Last but not least, there exist only a few works that combine street-side and aerial data for joint mesh reconstruction @cite_3 @cite_23 @cite_9 . Fr "uh and Zakhor @cite_3 construct meshes over street-side LiDAR range maps and over a large-scale Digital Surface Model (DSM). Unlike in our approach, they reconstruct a facade and an airborne mesh separately without topological fusion. @cite_9 solves the problem by directly applying Poisson surface reconstruction @cite_7 over the joint dense point cloud computed by patch-based MVS @cite_13 without a cross-consistency check between airborne and street-side data. @cite_23 integrate over 200M points from a tripod-mounted ground LiDAR and an aerial DSM, by using a distance field over an octree and an out-of-core dual contouring approach. Despite the quite complex algorithm, results are noisy and contain many large holes. In contrast, our approach performs cross-consistency filtering and produces a good quality watertight surface.
@cite_7 @cite_9 @cite_3 @cite_23 @cite_13
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Fusion of 3D airborne laser (LIDAR) data and terrestrial optical imagery can be applied in 3D urban modeling and model up-dating. The most challenging aspect of the fusion procedure is registering the terrestrial optical images on the LIDAR point clouds. In this article, we propose an approach for registering these two different data from different sensor sources. As we use iPhone camera images which are taken in front of the interested urban structure by the application user and the high resolution LIDAR point clouds of the acquired by an airborne laser sensor. After finding the photo capturing position and orientation from the iPhone photograph metafile, we automatically select the area of interest in the point cloud and transform it into a range image which has only grayscale intensity levels according to the distance from the image acquisition position. We benefit from local features for registering the iPhone image to the generated range image. In this article, we have applied the registration process based on local feature extraction and graph matching. Finally, the registration result is used for facade texture mapping on the 3D building surface mesh which is generated from the LIDAR point cloud. Our experimental results indicate possible usage of the proposed algorithm framework for 3D urban map updating and enhancing purposes. 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. 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. This paper presents techniques for the merging of 3D data coming from different sensors, such as ground and aerial laser range scans. The 3D models created are reconstructed to give a photo-realistic scene enabling interactive virtual walkthroughs, measurements and scene change analysis. The reconstructed model is based on a weighted integration of all available data based on sensor-specific parameters such as noise level, accuracy, inclination and reflectivity of the target, spatial distribution of points. The geometry is robustly reconstructed with a volumetric approach. Once registered and weighed, all data is re-sampled in a multi-resolution distance field using out-of-core techniques. The final mesh is extracted by contouring the iso-surface with a feature preserving dual contouring algorithm. The paper shows results of the above technique applied to Verona (Italy) city centre.