In this thesis, we address facade image interpretation as one essential ingredient for the generation of high-detailed, semantic meaningful, three-dimensional city-models. Given a single rectified facade image, we detect relevant facade objects such as windows, entrances, and balconies, which yield a description of the image in terms of accurate position and size of these objects. Urban digital...

Visualization of city scenes is important for many applications including entertainment and urban mission planning. Models covering wide areas can be efficiently constructed from aerial images. However, only roof details are visible from aerial views; ground views are needed to provide details of the building facades for high quality ’fly-through’ visualization or simulation applications. We pr...

Visualization of city scenes is important for many applications including entertainment and urban mission planning. Models covering wide areas can be efficiently constructed from aerial images. However, only roof details are visible from aerial views; ground views are needed to provide details of the building facades for high quality ’fly-through’ visualization or simulation applications. We pr...

Automation of facade images interpretation is a crucial task for efficient 3D modeling of urban areas. Information about regularities in facade images can be used for image completion of texture areas occluded with foreground objects, 3D model compression and texture quality enhancement. Existing approaches cannot handle the whole variety of buildings facades and often fail in cases of occluded...

Since being introduced in 1963, silicone resin emulsion paint (SREP) has developed into one of the most modern facade coating systems. While specific formulations and raw materials have changed in the last 42 years, the long-lasting performance properties resulting from the unique combination of water repellency, vapour permeability, low VOC and the silicon-resin based structure have remained c...

aspect ServerSide { abstract pointcut facadeMainExecution(); abstract Remote initFacadeInstance(); abstract String getSystemName(); abstract String getServerName(); Those abstract methods and pointcut are implemented by system specific aspects. The abstract aspect also defines and around advice that uses the abstract methods to export the facade instance and make it remotely available. Copyrigh...

This paper presents the results from a combined experimental and simulation analysis of a prototype photovoltaic facade when subjected to conditions typical of UK climate seasons. The departure of the electrical efficiency from peak published values is measured and the efficiency improvement associated with facade operation in combined power and heat recovery mode is estimated.

Urban facades contain large-scale repetitions in the form of windows, doors, etc. Such elements often are in different configurations (e.g., open or closed) obscuring their regular arrangements to any direct low-level pixel matching based repetition detection. We propose a variation-factored representation for facade images by progressively favoring larger repeated structures while allowing rel...

This paper presents an operational approach for extracting wire-frame models of street facades. Georeferenced terrestrial laser rawdata are acquired by a Mobile Mapping System (MMS). The MMS constitutes an adapted tool to massively collect accurate data at street level. After a filtering step of the 3D raw point cloud of street, the street point cloud is segmented into a cloud of dominant facad...

Plate tectonics is one of the major factors affecting the potential habitability of a terrestrial planet. The physics of plate tectonics is, however, still far from being complete, leading to considerable uncertainty when discussing planetary habitability. Here, I summarize recent developments on the evolution of plate tectonics on Earth, which suggest a radically new view on Earth dynamics: co...