@article{GARCIADORADO2013896,
title = "Automatic urban modeling using volumetric reconstruction with surface graph cuts",
journal = "Computers & Graphics",
volume = "37",
number = "7",
pages = "896 - 910",
year = "2013",
issn = "0097-8493",
doi = "https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cag.2013.07.003",
url = "http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0097849313001131",
author = "Ignacio Garcia-Dorado and Ilke Demir and Daniel G Aliaga",
keywords = "Automatic, Urban, Photo-consistency, Graph cuts, Volumetric reconstruction",
abstract = "The demand for 3D city-scale models has been significantly increased due to the proliferation of urban planning, city navigation, and virtual reality applications. We present an approach to automatically reconstruct buildings densely spanning a large urban area. Our method takes as input calibrated aerial images and available GIS meta-data. Our computational pipeline computes a per-building 2.5D volumetric reconstruction by exploiting photo-consistency where it is highly sampled amongst the aerial images. Our building surface graph cut method overcomes errors of occlusion, geometry, and calibration in order to stitch together aerial images and yield a visually coherent texture-mapped result. Our comparisons show similar quality to the manually modeled buildings of Google Earth, and show improvements over naive texture mapping and over space-carving methods. We have tested our algorithms with a 12sqkm area of Boston, MA (USA), using 4667 images (i.e., 280GB of raw image data) and producing 1785 buildings."
}