SAMATS – Triangle Grouping and Structure Recovery for 3D Building Modeling and Visualization

Location based and spatial technologies research for the web has endless application for mobile/position content delivery (m-commerce or p-commerce). By exploiting the inherent location-based intelligence of the underling spatial component, relevant examples can include geometrically accurate and photo realistic virtual representations for: property assessments; land/marine information systems; routing information; on-line shopping; cultural heritage/tourist information/sites; etc. A major challenge for this technology is its reliance on professional developers when creating the virtual worlds used for web-based navigation of these services. This paper describes SAMATS, a Semi-Automated Modeling And Texturing System, which has the capability of producing geometrically accurate and photorealistic VR building models for web-based p-commerce applications from a set of geo-referenced terrestrial images. This paper describes the second of three main components that comprise the full functionality of the complete SAMATS implementation. It focuses on the triangle grouping and structure recovery steps, while providing an overview of SAMATS’ other components.