A novel level set framework for LOD2 building modeling

3D city models typically consist of thousands of buildings in different types. We usually reconstruct these buildings automatically from high-resolution satellite or airborne imagery. However, for detailed roof reconstruction, 2D information offered by imagery data is not enough while DSM data is necessary. In this paper, we propose a novel level set framework for 3D building models in LOD2 with geometry structure of typical roofs. Local information is introduced towards multiphase and multichannel level set method. Its energy function is minimized when each part of roof data corresponds to the same normal vector as feature values for level set segmentation. The advantage of this method is that for complex building models, roof primitives as well as roof topology graph can be extracted from high-resolution DSM data with high accuracy, evaluated by completeness of segmentation and RMSE of 3D reconstruction. Thus, LOD2 building models can be reconstructed automatically with good performance. The very promising experimental results demonstrate the potentials of our method for large-scale building reconstruction in LOD2.