Quality-preserving multilevel mesh generation for building models

Abstract

ABSTRACT Three-dimensional (3D) high-fidelity building models are crucial for digital twin cities. Multi-scale modeling is crucial for accurately capturing the complexity of urban environments; however, existing methods often lack the flexibility required to satisfy the varied demands of diverse applications. In this paper, we propose a framework to continuously simplify 3D building models, it dynamically adjusts mesh accuracy to meet diverse needs, enabling seamless transitions from high-poly to medium and low-poly meshes. Our method contains three main stages: First, in the mesh repair stage, we introduce a novel mesh repair framework based on an advanced Marching Cubes 33 algorithm to ensure a watertight and clean topology mesh. Then, for generating medium-poly meshes, we employ a feature-preserving mesh simplification algorithm that combines curvature and area-weighted quadratic error metrics to achieve a high-fidelity simplified mesh. For generating low-poly meshes, we use the concept of carving visual hull to generate low-poly mesh with high visual similarity. Our method has been evaluated on building subsets of the Free3D and Thingi10 K datasets, as well as on various building models generated from different observation scales, and its superiority has been validated through extensive comparisons with state-of-the-art techniques.