Facade geometry generation from low-resolution aerial photographs for building energy modeling

In order to resolve the problem, this paper presents an automatic geometry modeling procedure of existing building facades, based on low-resolution aerial urban photographs, in order to recover their semantic structure as well as to synthesize geometric models for reuse in the BEM process. An iterative approach for building facade parsing is developed through the detection of facade structures. This approach is robust to image noise and under-sampling artifacts as they are common in aerial photographs. Based on this approach, the modeling system recovers high-level facade topologies and generates the geometry models of BEM for existing building facades. The geometry model generated is encoded into common BEM formats. Moreover, synthesis of realistic facade textures of the geometry model is achieved by using the City Geography Markup Language (CityGML). Finally, examples of energy simulation based on recovered BEM models are given illustrating the effectiveness of the proposed method and validating the process using real data.