Extracting buildings from aerial topographic maps

The recovery of 2D information from intensity images, and that of 3D information from range images are the major issues in 3D objects recognition from sensory data. The analysis and interpretation of remote sensing aerial images have important applications. This paper presents an efficient method for the analysis and modeling of such scenes based on range sensory data. Unlike methods using 2D intensity images, we exploit the rich 3D data. We extract symbolic information from the 3D triangular mesh models. These are used to recognize buildings using symbolic reasoning and generic object models.