Automated reconstruction of urban house roofs from aerial imagery

In this paper, an approach for the automated reconstruction of urban house roofs from aerial images is proposed. We model a house roof as a set of planar polygonal patches, each of which is extracted by object related image segmentation and coplanar grouping. For object related Image segmentation we employ a region segmentation method by the distance transform. Coplanar grouping and polygonal patch formation is performed by selecting 3D line segments that are matched across different views using epipolar geometry and flight information. The algorithm has been applied to aerial images and the results show accurate reconstruction of urban house roofs.