Automatic Reconstruction of Building Facade Model from Photogrammetric Mesh Model

Three-dimensional (3D) building facade model reconstruction is of great significance in urban applications and real-world visualization. This paper presents a newly developed method for automatically generating a 3D regular building facade model from the photogrammetric mesh model. To this end, the contour is tracked on irregular triangulation, and then the local contour tree method based on the topological relationship is employed to represent the topological structure of the photogrammetric mesh model. Subsequently, the segmented contour groups are found by analyzing the topological relationship of the contours, and the original mesh model is divided into various components from bottom to top through the iteration process. After that, each component is iteratively and robustly abstracted into cuboids. Finally, the parameters of each cuboid are adjusted to be close to the original mesh model, and a lightweight polygonal mesh model is taken from the adjusted cuboid. Typical buildings and a whole scene of photogrammetric mesh models are exploited to assess the proposed method quantitatively and qualitatively. The obtained results reveal that the proposed method can derive a regular facade model from a photogrammetric mesh model with a certain accuracy.