AUTOMATED CHAIN FOR LARGE-SCALE 3D RECONSTRUCTION OF URBAN SCENES FROM SATELLITE IMAGES

Abstract. Automatic city modeling from satellite imagery is a popular yet challenging topic in remote sensing, driven by numerous applications such as telecommunications, defence and urban mamagement. In this paper, we present an automated chain for large-scale 3D reconstruction of urban scenes with a Level of Detail 1 from satellite images. The proposed framework relies on two key ingredient. First, from a stereo pair of images, we estimate a digital terrain model and a digital height model, by using a novel set of feature descriptors based on multiscale morphological analysis. Second, inspired by recent works in machine learning, we extract in an automatic way contour polygons of buildings, by adopting a fully convolutional network U-Net followed by a polygonization of the predicted mask of buildings. We demonstrate the potential of our chain by reconstructing in an automated way different areas of the world.