View Planning for Site Modeling

Abstract

3-D models of complex environments, known as site models, are used in many different applications ranging from city planning, urban design, fire and police planning, military applications, virtual reality modeling and others. Site models are typically created by hand in a painstaking and error prone process. This paper focuses on two important problems in site modeling. The first is how to create a geometric and topologically correct 3-D solid from noisy data. The second problem is how to plan the next view to alleviate occlusions, reduce data set sizes, and provide full coverage of the scene. To acquire accurate CAD models of the scene we are using an incremental volumetric method based on set intersection that can recover multiple objects in a scene and merge models from different views of the scene. These models can serve as input to a planner that can reduce the number of views needed to fully acquire a scene. The planner can incorporate different constraints including visibility, ...