Procedural Editing of 3D Building Point Clouds

Ilke Demir, Daniel G. Aliaga, Bedrich Benes; Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015, pp. 2147-2155

Thanks to the recent advances in computational photography and remote sensing, point clouds of buildings are becoming increasingly available, yet their processing poses various challenges. In our work, we tackle the problem of point cloud completion and editing and we approach it via inverse procedural modeling. Contrary to the previous work, our approach operates directly on the point cloud without an intermediate triangulation. Our approach consists of 1) semi-automatic segmentation of the input point cloud with segment comparison and template matching to detect repeating structures, 2) a consensus-based voting schema and a pattern extraction algorithm to discover completed terminal geometry and their patterns of usage, all encoded into a context-free grammar, and 3) an interactive editing tool where the user can create new point clouds by using procedural copy and paste operations, and smart resizing. We demonstrate our approach on editing of building models with up to 1.8M points. In our implementation, preprocessing takes up to several minutes and a single editing operation needs from one second to one minute depending on the model size and the operation type.