Automatic generation of 3D outdoor and indoor building scenes from a single image

In this paper, a novel approach for creating 3D models of building scenes is presented. The proposed method is fully automated and fast, and accurately reconstructs both outdoor images of a building and indoor scenes, with perspective cues in real-time, using only one image. It combines the extracted line segments to identify the vanishing points of the image, the orientation, the different planes that are depicted in the image and concludes whether the image depicts indoor or outdoor scenes. In addition, the proposed method efficiently eliminates the perspective distortion and produces an accurate 3D model of the scene without any intervention from the user. The main innovation of the method is that it uses only one image for the 3D reconstruction, while other state-of-the-art methods rely on the processing of multiple images. A website and a database of 100 images were created to prove the efficiency of the proposed method in terms of time needed for the 3D reconstruction, its automation and 3D model accuracy and can be used by anyone so as to easily produce user-generated 3D content: http://3d-test.iti.gr:8080/3d-test/3D_recon/