A new method for 3D city map generation

3D city map has been well studied in recent years. Ground laser scanner or airborne lidar are often used to collect 3D information in traditional 3D city map generation methods. As these systems are specially designed, they are usually expensive and complicate for mass marketing. This paper proposes a simple and fast 3D city map generation method, which relies on image-based reconstruction algorithms and the 2D satellite map. Firstly, we reconstruct the buildings and get the top-view outlines of buildings. Secondly, we use the coherent point drift (CPD) method to register the points on the top-view outlines with the points on the edges extracted from the 2D satellite map. Thus, the reconstructed 3D buildings can be exactly located in the satellite map. The experiment results demonstrate the validity of our method.