| dc.description.abstract | In recent years, cyber cities have become very popular and useful in many applications.
However many problems remain unaddressed, specially those related to the difficult and
expensive acquisition of the data required to create three dimensional (3D) building models
and the tedious and time consuming procedures to be carried out.
The objective of this study is to propose a procedure for creating 3D building models using
completely free data available on the internet including satellite and ground images. The
proposed approach can be used as a framework for building spatial datasets (3D building
models) for countries or regions with limited access to advanced commercial and other spatial
data sources. In order to achieve this goal, a combination of different image processing
algorithms were performed. The entire process was divided into two main parts: buildings
detection, in which the purpose is the determination of the building outlines of the city
through an object-based analysis, and the creation of the 3D building model in different levels
of detail (LOD). The first phase comprises tasks of image enhancements, classification, edge
detection, mathematical image morphology algorithms, vectorization, regularization and
refinement. The second phase includes the building modeling from floor plans, and the
creation of highly detailed models for a few landmark buildings, including textures mapping,
selection, croppig, rotation and inpainting.
The final results prove that the proposed approach is effective for creating 3D building
models using free data. A quantitative analysis indicates that 1150 buildings out of the 1224
buildings shown in the image were successfully extracted, achieving 93.94% of completeness.
The reconstructed 3D building models are also accurate in terms of location. The method
proposed in this study provides a relatively economical alternative for creating 3D city
models from freely available images and other data. The generated models can be used for
different applications such as city planning and location-based service.
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