GENERATION OF 3D BUILDING MODELS FROM COMMERCIAL IMAGE DATABASE THROUGH SHADOW ANALYSIS

초록

Many people use a commercial image database such as Google Earth Image map from the internet. We propose a method by volumetric shadow analysis for generation of 3D building models from the commercial image database. The proposed method can extract building heights and building footprints using volumetric shadows analysis from a single image. No external control points are required. Instead, the proposed method needs the directions of the sun and the camera is needed. As the commercial image database does not provide them, we estimated them by simple image measurements and a known height of one reference building. For experiments, images extracted from Google Earth were used. For performance analysis of our method, building heights extracted by our method were compared with building heights extracted by stereo IKONOS images as reference. The Root Mean Square Errors (RMSE) calculated from the comparison were under 2 m. The experiment result shows 3D building models can be effectively generated from the commercial image database by the proposed method.