Rapid Production of Virtual Reality City Models

The growing demand for detailed city models has stimulated research on efficient 3D data acquisition. Over the past years, it has become evident that the automatic reconstruction of urban scenes is most promising if different types of data, possibly originating from different data sources are combined. In the approach presented in this paper the geometric reconstruction of urban areas is based on height data from airborne laser scanning and 2D GIS, which provides the ground plan geometry of buildings. Both data sources are used to estimate the type and parameter of basic primitives which in turn are combined to obtain complex building structures. The final output consists of 3D CAD models for the buildings. Using the reconstructed geometry, terrestrial images are mapped onto building facades to generate virtual city models.