BuildingFusion: Semantic-Aware Structural Building-Scale 3D Reconstruction

Scalable geometry reconstruction and understanding is an important yet unsolved task. Current methods often suffer from false loop closures when there are similar-looking rooms in the scene, and often lack online scene understanding. We propose BuildingFusion, a semantic-aware structural building-scale reconstruction system, which not only allows building-scale dense reconstruction collaboratively, but also provides semantic and structural information on-the-fly. Technically, the robustness to similar places is enabled by a novel semantic-aware room-level loop closure detection(LCD) method. The insight lies in that even though local views may look similar in different rooms, the objects inside and their locations are usually different, implying that the semantic information forms a unique and compact representation for place recognition. To achieve that, a 3D convolutional network is used to learn instance-level embeddings for similarity measurement and candidate selection, followed by a graph matching module for geometry verification. On the system side, we adopt a centralized architecture to enable collaborative scanning. Each agent reconstructs a part of the scene, and the combination is activated when the overlaps are found using room-level LCD, which is performed on the server. Extensive comparisons demonstrate the superiority of the semantic-aware room-level LCD over traditional image-based LCD. Live demo on the real-world building-scale scenes shows the feasibility of our method with robust, collaborative, and real-time performance.