Building Facade Reconstruction Using Crowd- Sourced Photos and Two-Dimensional Maps

Abstract

To address the high-cost problem of the current three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction for urban buildings, a new technical framework is proposed to generate 3D building facade information using crowd-sourced photos and two-dimensional (2D) building vector data in this paper. The crowd-sourced photos mainly consisted of Tencent street view images and other-source photos, which were collected from three platforms, including search engines, social media, and mobile phones. The photos were selected and grouped first, and then a structure from motion algorithm was used for 3D reconstruction. Finally, the reconstructed point clouds were registered with 2D building vector data. The test implementation was conducted in the Jianye District of Nanjing, China, and the generated point clouds showed a good fit with the true values. The proposed 3D reconstruction method represents a multi-sourced data integration process. The advantage of the proposed approach lies in the open source and low-cost data used in this study.