Recent advances in scanning technologies, in particular devices that extract depth through active sensing, allow fast scanning of urban scenes. Such rapid acquisition incurs imperfections: large regions remain missing, significant variation in sampling density is common, and the data is often corrupted with noise and outliers. However, buildings often exhibit large scale repetitions and selfsimilarities. Detecting, extracting, and utilizing such large scale repetitions provide powerful means to consolidate the imperfect data. Our key observation is that the same geometry, when scanned multiple times over reoccurrences of instances, allow application of a simple yet effective non-local filtering. The multiplicity of the geometry is fused together and projected to a base-geometry defined by clustering corresponding surfaces. Denoising is applied by separating the process into off-plane and in-plane phases. We show that the consolidation of the reoccurrences provides robust denoising and allow reliable completion of missing parts. We present evaluation results of the algorithm on several LiDAR scans of buildings of varying complexity and styles. 1

We introduce an interactive tool which enables a user to quickly assemble an architectural model directly over a 3D point cloud acquired from large-scale scanning of an urban scene. The user loosely defines and manipulates simple building blocks, which we call SmartBoxes, over the point samples. These boxes quickly snap to their proper locations to conform to common architectural structures. The key idea is that the building blocks are smart in the sense that their locations and sizes are automatically adjusted on-the-fly to fit well to the point data, while at the same time respecting contextual relations with nearby similar blocks. SmartBoxes are assembled through a discrete optimization to balance between two snapping forces defined respectively by a data-fitting term and a contextual term, which together assist the user in reconstructing the architectural model from a sparse and noisy point cloud. We show that a combination of the user’s interactive guidance and high-level knowledge about the semantics of the underlying model, together with the snapping forces, allows the reconstruction of structures which are partially or even completely missing from the input.

Abstract. We present a novel method for 3D reconstruction of urban scenes extending a recently introduced heightmap model. Our model has several advantages for 3D modeling of urban scenes: it naturally enforces vertical surfaces, has no holes, leads to an efficient algorithm, and is compact in size. We remove the major limitation of the heightmap by enabling modeling of overhanging structures. Our method is based on an an n-layer heightmap with each layer representing a surface between full and empty space. The configuration of layers can be computed optimally using a dynamic programming method. Our cost function is derived from probabilistic occupancy, and incorporates the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) for selecting the number of layers to use at each pixel. 3D surface models are extracted from the heightmap. We show results from a variety of datasets including Internet photo collections. Our method runs on the GPU and the complete system processes video at 13 Hz. 1

We present a method for fusing two acquisition modes, 2D photographs and 3D LiDAR scans, for depth-layer decomposition of urban facades. The two modes have complementary characteristics: point cloud scans are coherent and inherently 3D, but are often sparse, noisy, and incomplete; photographs, on the other hand, are of high resolution, easy to acquire, and dense, but view-dependent and inherently 2D, lacking critical depth information. In this paper we use photographs to enhance the acquired LiDAR data. Our key observation is that with an initial registration of the 2D and 3D datasets we can decompose the input photographs into rectified depth layers. We decompose the input photographs into rectangular planar fragments and diffuse depth information from the corresponding 3D scan onto the fragments by solving a multi-label assignment problem. Our layer decomposition enables accurate repetition detection in each planar layer, using which we propagate geometry, remove outliers and enhance the 3D scan. Finally, the algorithm produces an enhanced, layered, textured model. We evaluate our algorithm on complex multi-planar building facades, where direct autocorrelation methods for repetition detection fail. We demonstrate how 2D photographs help improve the 3D scans by exploiting data redundancy, and transferring high level structural information to (plausibly) complete large missing regions. 1.

We introduce a novel framework for image-based 3D reconstruction of urban buildings based on symmetry priors. Starting from image-level edges, we generate a sparse and approximate set of consistent 3D lines. These lines are then used to simultaneously detect symmetric line arrangements while refining the estimated 3D model. Operating both on 2D image data and intermediate 3D feature representations, we perform iterative feature consolidation and effective outlier pruning, thus eliminating reconstruction artifacts arising from ambiguous or wrong stereo matches. We exploit non-local coherence of symmetric elements to generate precise model reconstructions, even in the presence of a significant amount of outlier image-edges arising from reflections, shadows, outlier objects, etc. We evaluate our algorithm on several challenging test scenarios, both synthetic and real. Beyond reconstruction, the extracted symmetry patterns are useful towards interactive and intuitive model manipulations.

Abstract—This paper presents a novel modeling framework to build 3D models of Chinese architectures from elevation drawing. Our algorithm integrates the capability of automatic drawing recognition with powerful procedural modeling to extract production rules from elevation drawing. First, different from the previous symbol-based floor plan recognition, based on the repetitive pattern trees, small horizontal repetitive regions of the elevation drawing are clustered in a bottom-up manner to form architectural components with maximum repetition, which collectively serve as building blocks for 3D model generation. Second, to discover the global architectural structure and its components ’ interdependencies, the components are structured into a shape tree in a top-down subdivision manner and recognized hierarchically at each level of the shape tree based on Markov Random Fields (MRF). Third, shape grammar rules can be derived to construct the 3D semantic model and its possible variations with the help of a 3D component repository. The salient contribution lies in the novel integration of procedural modeling with elevation drawing, with a unique application to Chinese architectures.

Creating 3D digital assets of urban environments is a challenging task, requiring a significant amount of manual labor. To automate parts of this process, many procedural modeling methods to automatically create buildings, plants or entire cities were introduced. The main advantage of such methods compared to manual methods is the ability to create large amounts of assets using just a few parameters as input data. However, the main disadvantage is the difficulty to control or predict the output of such methods. Direct controllability is especially important for artists enabling them to model the output to their vision or requirements. Therefore, the main goal of this thesis is combining the direct control provided by manual methods with the power of procedural modeling. To achieve this, several new methods and paradigms bringing direct and visual artist control to procedural generation of urban environments are contributed in this thesis. These include a method enabling a visual design process for building grammars, as well as methods providing direct artist

In this paper, we address the problem of inverse procedural modeling: Given a piece of exemplar 3D geometry, we would like to find a set of rules that describe objects that are similar to the exemplar. We consider local similarity, i.e., each local neighborhood of the newly created object must match some local neighborhood of the exemplar. We show that we can find explicit shape modification rules that guarantee strict local similarity by looking at the structure of the partial symmetries of the object. By cutting the object into pieces along curves within symmetric areas, we can build shape operations that maintain local similarity by construction. We systematically collect such editing operations and analyze their dependency to build a shape grammar. We discuss how to extract general rewriting systems, context free hierarchical rules, and gridbased rules. All of this information is derived directly from the model, without user interaction. The extracted rules are then used to implement tools for semi-automatic shape modeling by example, which are demonstrated on a number of different example data sets. Overall, our paper provides a concise theoretical and practical framework for inverse procedural modeling of 3D objects.

An early goal of computer vision was to build a system that could automatically understand a 3D scene just by looking. This requires not only the ability to extract 3D information from image information alone, but also to handle the large variety of different environments that comprise our visual world. This paper summarizes our recent efforts toward these goals. First, we describe the SUN database, which is a collection of annotated images spanning 908 different scene categories. This database allows us to systematically study the space of possible everyday scenes and to establish a benchmark for scene and object recognition. We also explore ways of coping with the variety of viewpoints within these scenes. For this, we have introduced a database of 360 ◦ panoramic images for many of the scene categories in the SUN database and have explored viewpoint recognition within the environments. Finally, we describe steps toward a unified 3D parsing of everyday scenes: (i) the ability to localize geometric primitives in images, such as cuboids and cylinders, which often comprise many everyday objects, and (ii) an integrated system to extract the 3D structure of the scene and objects depicted in an image.

Figure 1: Starting from an orthogonal input image (left top), the user interactively segments the façade into shapes (bottom left). Most split lines and symmetries are found automatically by the system, while the global façade structure is determined by the user. The input resolution is 1024 × 756, the number of visible shapes is 1346, and the modeling time is about 8 minutes (with material and depth assignments about 15 minutes). We propose a novel interactive framework for modeling building façades from images. Our method is based on the notion of coherence-based editing which allows exploiting partial symmetries across the façade at any level of detail. The proposed workflow mixes manual interaction with automatic splitting and grouping operations based on unsupervised cluster analysis. In contrast to previous work, our approach leads to detailed 3d geometric models with up to several thousand regions per façade. We compare our modeling scheme to others and evaluate our approach in a user study with an experienced user and several novice users.