TOBAGO - a semi-automated approach for the generation of 3-D building models

3-D city models are in increasing demand for a great number of applications. Photogrammetry is a relevant technology that can provide an abundance of geometric, topologic and semantic information concerning these models. The pressure to generate a large amount of data with high degree of accuracy and completeness poses a great challenge to photogrammetry. The development of automated and semi-automated methods for the generation of those data sets is therefore a key issue in photogrammetric research. We present in this article a strategy and methodology for an efficient generation of even fairly complex building models. Within this concept we request the operator to measure the house roofs from a stereomodel in form of an unstructured point cloud. According to our experience this can be done very quickly. Even a non-experienced operator can measure several hundred roofs or roof units per day. In a second step we fit generic building models fully automatically to these point clouds. The structure information is inherently included in these building models. In such a way geometric, topologic and even semantic data can be handed over to a CAD-system, in our case AutoCad, for further visualization and manipulation. The structuring is achieved in three steps. In a first step a classifier is initiated which recognizes the class of houses a particular roof point cloud belongs to. This recognition step is primarily based on the analysis of the number of ridge points. In the second and third steps the concrete topological relations between roof points are investigated and generic building models are fitted to the point clouds. Based on the technique of constraint-based reasoning mio geometrical parsers are solving this problem. We have tested the methodology under a variety of different conditions in several pilot projects. The results will indicate the good performance of our approach. In addition we will demonstrate how the results can be used for visualization (texture mapping) and animation (walk-throughs and fly-overs). (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.