Automatic Model Selection for 3D Reconstruction of Buildings from Satellite Imagary

Through the improvements of satellite sensor and matching technology, the derivation of 3D models from space borne stereo data obtained a lot of interest for various applications such as mobile navigation, urban planning, telecommunication, and tourism. The automatic reconstruction of 3D building models from space borne point cloud data is still an active research topic. The challenging problem in this field is the relatively low quality of the Digital Surface Model (DSM) generated by stereo matching of satellite data comparing to airborne LiDAR data. In order to establish an efficient method to achieve high quality models and complete automation from the mentioned DSM, in this paper a new method based on a model-driven strategy is proposed. For improving the results, refined orthorectified panchromatic images are introduced into the process as additional data. The idea of this method is based on ridge line extraction and analysing height values in direction of and perpendicular to the ridgeline direction. After applying pre-processing to the orthorectified data, some feature descriptors are extracted from the DSM, to improve the automatic ridge line detection. Applying RANSAC a line is fitted to each group of ridge points. Finally these ridge lines are refined by matching them or closing gaps. In order to select the type of roof model the heights of point in extension of the ridge line and height differences perpendicular to the ridge line are analysed. After roof model selection, building edge information is extracted from canny edge detection and parameters derived from the roof parts. Then the best model is fitted to extracted façade roofs based on detected type of model. Each roof is modelled independently and final 3D buildings are reconstructed by merging the roof models with the corresponding walls