Extracting orthogonal building objects in urban areas from high resolution stereo satellite image pairs

Since the number of urban residents is rapidly increasing, especially in developing countries, relatively cheap and fast methods for modeling and mapping such cities are required. Besides the creation and updating of maps from sprawling cities three dimensional models are useful for simulation, monitoring and planning in case of catastrophic events like flooding, tsunamis or earthquakes. With the availability of very high resolution (VHR) stereo satellite data investigations of large urban areas regarding their three-dimensional shape can be performed fast and relatively cheap in comparison to aerial photography – especially for cities in developing countries. Most of the methods actually used for the generation of city models depend on a large amount of interactive work and mostly also on additional information like building footprints and so on. A method for a fully automatic derivation of relatively coarse and simple models of urban structure is therefore of great use. In this paper one approach for such an automatic modeling and a processing chain is sketched and the method used for the modeling of buildings is described.