Large Scale Texture Mapping of Building Facades

A virtual 3-dimension city model is a sophisticated application of geoinformatic systems as it represents layouts, activities and functionalities of a real-world community. To enable human users to better visualize their living spaces, a virtual reality city model must be both immersive and accurately re-created. Visualization of city models in such environments is a combination of many challenging and laborious tasks, one of which is the texturing of building models façade. To improve the photo-realism and textural information of the building model façade, close-range digital photographs of buildings are taken at oblique angles and used to texture the building models. This paper will show that by taking oblique views of buildings, we are able to perform large scale texture mapping on multiple buildings models and improve the overall workflow of the entire façade texture extraction process. Registration of the digital images must be carried out to obtain the images’ extrinsic and intrinsic parameters before accurate texture mapping can take place. Spatial distortions due to irregularly shaped façade polygons are introduced during the texture extraction process and a method was devised to overcome this problem. A test example will be used to demonstrate the system of performing large scale texture mapping using minimal amount of close-range photographs. * Corresponding author.