From June 12nd-17th, the 8th International UBI Summer School (UBISS) 2017 took place at the University of Oulu, Finland. The summer school comprised four parallel 6-day workshops. Prof. Norbert Haala and me from the University of Stuttgart visited Oulu as instructors of one of the four workshops – Virtual City Models.
During the 6 days, the participants of our workshop got an insight and hands-on experience on the complete pipeline from image data acquisition, over 3D dense reconstruction and meshing to finally representing building models in a Virtual Reality environment. For that purpose, the group chose the Market Square of Oulu as a case study area. After the planning phase, on two subsequent days UAV flights were performed to gather aerial imagery. Additionally, a multitude of terrestrial images was gathered with a variety of cameras and smartphones. This data was then used to generate dense point clouds and colored meshes. Clouds of different sources were compared in terms of accuracy and consistency.
Furthermore investigations were made about integrating photogrammetric exports directly into Unity versus pre-processing the colored meshes for game engine use. In between processing and project work, the instructors held lectures to give a background on photogrammetric image processing and city model reconstruction techniques.
