BRIGHTEARTH: PIPELINE FOR ON-THE-FLY 3D RECONSTRUCTION OF URBAN AND RURAL SCENES FROM ONE SATELLITE IMAGE

Abstract

With the growth of the availability and quality of satellite images, automatic 3D reconstruction from optical satellite images remains a popular research topic. Numerous applications, such as telecommunications and defence, directly benefit from the use of 3D models of both urban and rural scenes. While most of the state-of-the-art methods use stereo pairs for 3D reconstruction, such pairs are not immediately available anywhere in the world. In this paper, we propose an automatic pipeline for very-large-scale 3D reconstruction of urban and rural scenes from one high-resolution satellite image. Convolutional neural networks are trained to extract key semantic information. The extracted information is then converted into GIS vector format, and enriched by both terrain and object height information. The final classification step is applied, yielding a 16-class 3D map. The presented pipeline is operational and available for commercial purposes under the BrightEarth trademark.