RECONSTRUCTION OF 3D MODELS FROM POINT CLOUDS WITH HYBRID REPRESENTATION

Abstract. The three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction of urban buildings from point clouds has long been an active topic in applications related to human activities. However, due to the structures significantly differ in terms of complexity, the task of 3D reconstruction remains a challenging issue especially for the freeform surfaces. In this paper, we present a new reconstruction algorithm which allows the 3D-models of building as a combination of regular structures and irregular surfaces, where the regular structures are parameterized plane primitives and the irregular surfaces are expressed as meshes. The extraction of irregular surfaces starts with an over-segmented method for the unstructured point data, a region growing approach based the adjacent graph of super-voxels is then applied to collapse these super-voxels, and the freeform surfaces can be clustered from the voxels filtered by a thickness threshold. To achieve these regular planar primitives, the remaining voxels with a larger flatness will be further divided into multiscale super-voxels as basic units, and the final segmented planes are enriched and refined in a mutually reinforcing manner under the framework of a global energy optimization. We have implemented the proposed algorithms and mainly tested on two point clouds that differ in point density and urban characteristic, and experimental results on complex building structures illustrated the efficacy of the proposed framework.