FEATURE LINE BASED BUILDING DETECTION AND RECONSTRUCTION FROM OBLIQUE AIRBORNE IMAGERY

Abstract. In this paper, a feature line based method for building detection and reconstruction from oblique airborne imagery is presented. With the development of Multi-View Stereo technology, increasing photogrammetric softwares are provided to generate textured meshes from oblique airborne imagery. However, errors in image matching and mesh segmentation lead to the low geometrical accuracy of building models, especially at building boundaries. To simplify massive meshes and construct accurate 3D building models, we integrate multi-view images and meshes by using feature lines, in which contour lines are used for building detection and straight skeleton for building reconstruction. Firstly, through the contour clustering method, buildings can be quickly and robustly detected from meshes. Then, a feature preserving mesh segmentation method is applied to accurately extract 3D straight skeleton from meshes. Finally, straight feature lines derived from multi-view images are used to rectify inaccurate parts of 3D straight skeleton of buildings. Therefore, low quality model can be refined by the accuracy improvement of mesh feature lines and rectification with feature lines of multi-view images. The test dataset in Zürich is provided by ISPRS/EuroSDR initiative Benchmark on High Density Image Matching for DSM Computation. The experiments reveal that the proposed method can obtain convincing and high quality 3D building models from oblique airborne imagery.