Connectivity-aware Graph: A planar topology for 3D building surface reconstruction

Abstract

Multi-view Stereo (MVS) meshes suffer from occlusions or missing data, making most surface reconstruction methods invalid. Due to data imperfections, existing methods, just like PolyFit, have made a trade-off between reconstruction accuracy and time consumption. We propose a novel approach that automatically reconstructs a building surface model from raw triangular mesh with data incompleteness. Unlike existing methods that extract high-quality primitives, our method focuses on assemblies of primitives to control the level of geometric detail in the reconstructed models. We design a topological relationship of the primitives to form a plane connection graph. To be precise, we first combine the scalability of shapes with plane primitives. Then strong and soft connections between primitives are constructed by calculating the confidence of the plane intersection in space. Furthermore, the topological relations of all primitives are encoded into an undirected graph. Finally, a watertight and manifold model is extracted from the faces of a candidate set by energy minimization. Experiments on the Helsinki 3D dataset demonstrate the superiority of our method in time consumption and reconstruction error, as measured by Hausdorff distance. Our method outperforms other primitive-based algorithms in handling non-planar structures. Even when dealing with imperfect data, a watertight model is still obtained.