Generation of architectural CAD models using a mobile robot

This paper describes new algorithms for automatically constructing a computer aided design (CAD) model of a structured scene as imaged by a single camera on a mobile robot. The scene to be modeled is assumed to be composed mostly of linear edges with particular orientations in 3-D. This is the case for most indoor scenes as well as some outdoor urban scenes. The orientation data is used by a motion stereo algorithm to estimate the 3-D structure using a sequence of images. The algorithm assumes that the linear edges are the boundaries of opaque planar patches, such as the floor, the ceiling and the walls. The resulting 3-D description is a CAD model of the scene. Applications of this technique include CAD modeling for architecture and computer graphics, and robot navigation. This paper completes earlier publications and therefore concentrates on the latter parts of processing, including automatically tracking segments, and using the resulting models in different applications