Camera localization and building reconstruction from single monocular images

This paper presents a new method for reconstructing rectilinear buildings from single images under the assumption of flat terrain. An intuition of the method is that, given an image composed of rectilinear buildings, the 3D buildings can be geometrically reconstructed by using the image only. The recovery algorithm is formulated in terms of two objective functions which are based on the equivalence between the vector normal to the interpretation plane in the image space and the vector normal to the rotated interpretation plane in the object space. These objective functions are minimized with respect to the camera pose, the building dimensions, locations and orientations to obtain estimates for the structure of the scene. The method potentially provides a solution for large-scale urban modelling using aerial images, and can be easily extended to deal with piecewise planar objects in a more general situation.