Interactive 3D City Modeling using Google Earth and Ground Images

A new interactive approach is presented and implemented for constructing 3D city models from Google Earth and ground images. Using the roof size provided by Google Earth and the image coordinates of the four corner points of the building rectangular facade, without any prior knowledge about the parameters of the camera, we show a method for obtaining the building height and facades textures from single ground image. Furthermore, we show an algorithm for computing the tree height using a known building height and shadows in the satellite image. Based on the height and texture acquisition methods presented in this paper and geographic information provided by Google Earth, the 3D model of a typical urban site is constructed and rendered using OpenGL. The modeling results indicate that our method has many good characteristics such as low cost, simple manipulation and satisfying resolution.