PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT OF FULLY AUTOMATIC THREE-DIMENSIONAL CITY MODEL RECONSTRUCTION METHODS

Abstract. Three-dimensional urban region representations can be used for detailed urban monitoring, change and damage detection purposes. In order to obtain three-dimensional representation, one of the easiest and cheapest way is to use Digital Surface Models (DSMs) which are generated from very high resolution stereo satellite images using stereovision techniques. Unfortunately after applying the DSM generation process, we cannot directly obtain three-dimensional urban region representation. In the DSM which is generated using only one stereo image pair, generally noise, matching errors, and uncertainty on building wall locations are very high. These undesirable effects prevents a DSM to provide a realistic three-dimensional city representation. Therefore, some automatic techniques should be applied to obtain three-dimensional city models using DSMs as input. In order to solve the existing problems in this field, herein we introduce two automated approaches based on usage of DSMs as input. The first method depends on using of a 3D active shape model for building shape extraction and 3D reconstruction, the second approach is based on an approximation of prismatic models to DSMs. Our experimental results on images and DSMs of Tunis city which are obtained from WorldView-2 satellite indicate possible usage of the proposed algorithms to obtain three-dimensional city representations automatically.