Fast and Incremental 3D Model Renewal for Urban Scenes With Appearance Changes

ABSTRACT Urban 3D models with high‐resolution details are the basis of various mixed reality and geographic information systems. Fast and accurate urban reconstruction from aerial photographs has attracted intense attention. Existing methods exploit multi‐view geometry information from landscape patterns with similar illumination conditions and terrain appearance. In practice, urban models become obsolete over time due to human activities. Mainstream reconstruction pipelines rebuild the whole scene even if the main part of them remains unchanged. This paper proposes a novel wrapping‐based incremental modeling framework to reuse existing models and renew them with new meshes efficiently. The paper illustrates a pose optimization method with illumination‐based augmentation and virtual bundle adjustment. Besides, a high‐performance wrapping‐based meshing method is proposed for fast reconstruction. Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve higher performance and quality than state‐of‐the‐art methods. We use the scene rendering as a reference generator to efficiently calibrate new images from different perspectives and update local area meshes of the obsolete model surface.