Use of SfM-MVS approach to nadir and oblique images generated throught aerial cameras to build 2.5D map and 3D models in urban areas

Abstract

The use of Structure-from-Motion (SfM) and Multi-View-Stereo (MVS) approaches to build 3D models of structures belonging to the Cultural Heritage environment is becoming more widespread. Due to the big dimensions of the digital aerial images generated by airborne sensors and, consequently, computation problems, these images were rarely used for the construction of 3D models through SfM-MVS approach. In addition, the values of overlap used in traditional aerial surveys would lead to a geometry of acquisition that is quite weak. For these reasons, the use of aerial images generated by airborne sensors in the SfM-MVS approach was limited. However, taking into account the possibility to acquire aerial nadir and oblique images according to multi-view, the increasing of High Performance Computation and the use of Direct Georeferencing, the quality of the city model obtained with the SfM/MVS approach was evaluated on a dataset of aerial images involving the Old Town of Bordeux.

Keywords:

• SfM
• oblique camera
• 3D city model
• aerial platforms
• hybrid sensors

Acknowledgements

We want to thanks Mr Felix Rohrbach of Leica Geosystems for providing the raw aerial datasets. In addition, we want to thanks the reviewers for their careful reading of the manuscript and their constructive remarks.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).