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ABSTRACT:In this paper we present the further evaluation of DLR's modular airborne camera system MACS-Micro for small unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The main focus is on standardized calibration procedures and on photogrammetric workflows. The current prototype consists of an industrial grade frame imaging camera with 12 megapixel resolutions and a compact GNSS/IMU solution which are operated by an embedded computing unit (CPU). The camera was calibrated once pre-flight and several times post-flight over a period of 5 month using a three dimensional test field. The verification of the radiometric quality of the acquired images has been done under controlled static conditions and kinematic conditions testing different demosaicing methods. The validation of MACSMicro is done by comparing a traditional photogrammetric evaluation with the workflows of Agisoft Photoscan and Pix4D Mapper. The analyses are based on an aerial survey of an urban environment using precise ground control points and acquired GNSS observations. Aerial triangulations with different configuratrions of ground control points (GCP's) had been calculated, comparing the results of using a camera self-calibration and introducing fixed interior orientation parameters for Agisoft and Pix4D. The results are promising concerning the metric characteristics of the used camera and achieved accuracies in this test case. Further aspects have to be evaluated by further expanded test scenarios.

ABSTRACT:This paper proposes a method for the reconstruction of city buildings with automatically derived textures that can be directly used for façade element classification. Oblique and nadir aerial imagery recorded by a multi-head camera system is transformed into dense 3D point clouds and evaluated statistically in order to extract the hull of the structures. For the resulting wall, roof and ground surfaces high-resolution polygonal texture patches are calculated and compactly arranged in a texture atlas without resampling. The façade textures subsequently get analyzed by a commercial software package to detect possible windows whose contours are projected into the original oriented source images and sparsely ray-casted to obtain their 3D world coordinates. With the windows being reintegrated into the previously extracted hull the final building models are stored as semantically annotated CityGML "LOD-2.5" objects.

Aerial imaging systems increasingly gain oblique viewing capabilities. Through these passive systems, photogrammetric 3D point clouds of a scene become available in addition to traditional vertical 2.5D information. In the field of urban reconstruction, this complementary information seeks for robust and automated fusion methods in order to derive 3D building geometry as well as topology in larger scales. It is sequentially shown how to get from façade planes over building footprints to roof reconstruction including overhangs. Façade planes are extracted from a photogrammetric high-resolution 3D point cloud. Local regression methods in 2D space are used to determine the local direction and a criterion for the local linearity of the point cloud. Based on these two parameters, the 3D point cloud is segmented according to which façade it belongs to. From the segmented point cloud, building footprints are extracted as polygons. Similar to cadaster information, those polygons, along with a traditional digital surface model (DSM), serve for one thing as the basis for overhang determination which is performed by fitting polynoms on the outside of façades and using their inflection points as overhang boundary. For another thing, they serve as roof areas which are segmented, topologically described and geometrically modelled. Again local regression methods are used but this time in 3D space in order to segment roof parts. Subsequently, the roof topology is derived using region growing methods. The final building models hold both, geometrical and topological properties.

ABSTRACT:This paper proposes a two-stage method for the reconstruction of city buildings with discontinuities and roof overhangs from oriented nadir and oblique aerial images. To model the structures the input data is transformed into a dense point cloud, segmented and filtered with a modified marching cubes algorithm to reduce the positional noise. Assuming a monolithic building the remaining vertices are initially projected onto a 2D grid and passed to RANSAC-based regression and topology analysis to geometrically determine finite wall, ground and roof planes. If this should fail due to the presence of discontinuities the regression will be repeated on a 3D level by traversing voxels within the regularly subdivided bounding box of the building point set. For each cube a planar piece of the current surface is approximated and expanded. The resulting segments get mutually intersected yielding both topological and geometrical nodes and edges. These entities will be eliminated if their distance-based affiliation to the defining point sets is violated leaving a consistent building hull including its structural breaks. To add the roof overhangs the computed polygonal meshes are projected onto the digital surface model derived from the point cloud. Their shapes are offset equally along the edge normals with subpixel accuracy by detecting the zero-crossings of the second-order directional derivative in the gradient direction of the height bitmap and translated back into world space to become a component of the building. As soon as the reconstructed objects are finished the aerial images are further used to generate a compact texture atlas for visualization purposes. An optimized atlas bitmap is generated that allows perspectivecorrect multi-source texture mapping without prior rectification involving a partially parallel placement algorithm. Moreover, the texture atlases undergo object-based image analysis (OBIA) to detect window areas which get reintegrated into the building models. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method a proof-of-concept test on sample structures obtained from real-world data of Heligoland/Germany has been conducted. It revealed good reconstruction accuracy in comparison to the cadastral map, a speed-up in texture atlas optimization and visually attractive render results.