Reviewing Open Data Semantic 3D City Models to Develop Novel 3D Reconstruction Methods

Abstract. Structured semantic 3D city models are pivotal in creating urban 3D digital twins. The wide adoption of such models has been primarily enabled by robust, model-based, and automatic 3D reconstruction methods. However, these methods impose requirements on the reconstruction, mainly restricting the solution space to several model types and relying on accurate 2D footprints. Recent research shows that deep-learning-based methods promise highly generic solution space and are footprint-free. Yet, the current training and test datasets are limited, hindering the methods’ development. In this work, we analyze the ubiquity of already existing, open 3D city model datasets and their potential to serve as a large-scale training and test set for 3D reconstruction, where 27 potential dataset collections have been identified. Our review shows that more than 215 million building models are readily available. We firmly believe that this review will facilitate further research on robust automatic 3D city model reconstruction and serve as a reference for benchmarking 3D city models.