Context-based urban terrain reconstruction from images and videos

Abstract

Detection of buildings and vegetation, and even more reconstruction of urban terrain from sequences of aerial images and videos is known to be a challenging task. It has been established that those methods that have as input a high-quality Digital Surface Model (DSM), are more straight-forward and produce more robust and reliable results than those image-based methods that require matching line segments or even whole regions. This motivated us to develop a new dense matching technique for DSM generation that is capable of simultaneous integration of multiple images in the reconstruction process. The DSMs generated by this new multi-image matching technique can be used for urban object extraction. In the first contribution of this paper, two examples of external sources of information added to the reconstruction pipeline will be shown. The GIS layers are used for recognition of streets and suppressing false alarms in the depth maps that were caused by moving vehicles while the near infrared channel is applied for separating vegetation from buildings. Three examples of data sets including both UAV-borne video sequences with a relatively high number of frames and high-resolution (10 cm ground sample distance) data sets consisting of (few spatial-temporarily diverse) images from large-format aerial frame cameras, will be presented. By an extensive quantitative evaluation of the Vaihingen block from the ISPRS benchmark on urban object detection, it will become clear that our procedure allows a straight-forward, efficient, and reliable instantiation of 3D city models.