Interactive 3D Architectural Modeling from Unordered Photo Collections

Sudipta Sinha, Drew Steedly, Rick Szeliski, Maneesh Agrawala, Marc Pollefeys

Abstract

We present an interactive system for generating photorealistic, textured, piecewise-planar 3D models of architectural structures and urban scenes from unordered sets of photographs. To reconstruct 3D geometry in our system, the user draws outlines overlaid on 2D photographs. The 3D structure is then automatically computedby combining the 2D interaction with the multi-view geometric information recovered by performing structure from motion analysis on the input photographs. We utilize vanishing point constraints at multiple stages during the reconstruction, which is particularly useful for architectural scenes where parallel lines are abundant. Our approach enables us to accurately model polygonal faces from 2D interactions in a single image. Our system also supports useful operations such as edge snapping and extrusions. Seamless texture maps are automatically generated by combining multiple input photographs using graph cut optimization and Poisson blending. The user can add brush strokes as hints during the texture generation stage to remove artifacts caused by unmodeled geometric structures. We build models for a variety of architectural scenes from collections of up to about a hundred photographs.

Our interactive image-based modeling system provides an intuitive sketch-based interface for reconstructing a photorealistic textured piecewise planar 3D model of a building or architectural scene from an unordered collection of photographs.

Research Paper

PDF (2.2M)

Videos

AVI (36.9M)

AVI (35.8M)

Additional Links

UNC Website

Interactive 3D Architectural Modeling from Unordered Photo Collections
SIGGRAPH Asia 2008, December 2008. 159:1-159:10.