Horizontal Plane Detection From3D Point Clouds Of Buildings

3D reconstruction plays a role of significance in the field of computer vision. Thereconstruction technology, combining the algorithms of structure from motion (SFM)and multi-view stereo (MVS), is a commonly used reconstruction method, because ofits low requirements for images and the capability of a complete reconstruction of alarge-scale scene. In this paper, the algorithms of Bundler and CMVS are employed torealize the3D reconstruction of building scenes. By going into the reconstruction results,presented is a novel method of horizontal plane detection from3D point clouds ofbuildings.The detection of the horizontal plane or its normal direction is important in theprocessing of3D point clouds of buildings. Generally, the horizontal plane is detectedfrom clues of vanishing points of visual images or from the border detection of3D pointdata. However, these traditional methods are adoptable only in restrictive conditions thatthe horizontal or vertical lines are obvious and abundant in building structures.Considering the main characters of most building structures and all the3D data of abuilding reconstruction, in the help of the algorithm of RANSAC, a horizontal plane canbe detected efficiently by the method proposed in the paper. The detection method issuitable for many buildings with various structures. And the experimental resultsdemonstrate that the method is simple and robust.3D reconstruction of buildings is a key step of3D city-scale map generation.Thanks to the results of the horizontal plane detection, a new idea of3D city-scale mapgeneration comes out, that the points of the top view of the building reconstructionshould be matched with the contour information of where the building is located on thesatellite map. On one hand, because the satellite map is used to combine individualreconstructed building, we can build a complete3D city map without considering theconnection between buildings as long as every building can be reconstructed; on theother hand, as low quality the images are required, a complete scene reconstruction iseasy to obtain, just with an ordinary photo equipment. The feasibility of the idea isproved by the experiments on the main building of Shaanxi Province Art Museum.