Abstract

The modelling of 3-dimensional (3D) environments has become a requirement for many applications in engineering design, virtual reality, visualisation and entertainment. However the scale and complexity demanded from such models has risen to the point where the acquisition of 3D models can require a vast amount of specialist time and equipment. Because of this much research has been undertaken in the computer vision community into automating all or part of the process of acquiring a 3D model from a sequence of images. This thesis focuses specifically on the automatic acquisition of architectural models from short image sequences. An architectural model is defined as a set of planes corresponding to walls which contain a variety of labelled primitives such as doors and windows. As well as a label defining its type, each primitive contains parameters defining its shape and texture. The key advantage of this representation is that the model defines not only geometry and texture, but also an interpretation of the scene. This is crucial as it enables reasoning about the scene; for instance, structure and texture can be inferred in areas of the model which are unseen in any