Surface reconstruction from multiple aerial images in dense urban areas

Accurate 3D surface models of dense urban areas are essential for a variety of applications, such as cartography, urban planning and monitoring, mobile communications, etc. Since manual surface reconstruction is very costly and time-consuming, the development of automated algorithms is of great importance. While most of existing algorithms focus on surface reconstruction either in rural or sub-urban areas, we present an approach dealing with dense urban scenes. The approach utilizes different image-derived cues, like multi-view stereo and color information, as well as the general scene knowledge, formulated in data-driven reasoning and geometric constraints. Another important feature of our approach is simultaneous processing of 2D and 3D data. Our approach begins with two independent tasks: stereo reconstruction using multiple views and region-based image segmentation, resulting in generation disparity and segmentation maps, respectively. Then, the information derived from the both maps is utilized for generation of a dense elevation map, through robust verification of planar surface approximations for the detected regions and imposition of geometric constraints. The approach has been successfully tested on complex residential and industrial scenes.