Mesh Conflation of Oblique Photogrammetric Models using Virtual Cameras
  and Truncated Signed Distance Field
Shuang Song Rongjun Qin
Conflating/stitching 2.5D raster digital surface models (DSM) into a large
one has been a running practice in geoscience applications, however, conflating
full-3D mesh models, such as those from oblique photogrammetry, is extremely
challenging. In this letter, we propose a novel approach to address this
challenge by conflating multiple full-3D oblique photogrammetric models into a
single, and seamless mesh for high-resolution site modeling. Given two or more
individually collected and created photogrammetric meshes, we first propose to
create a virtual camera field (with a panoramic field of view) to incubate
virtual spaces represented by Truncated Signed Distance Field (TSDF), an
implicit volumetric field friendly for linear 3D fusion; then we adaptively
leverage the truncated bound of meshes in TSDF to conflate them into a single
and accurate full 3D site model. With drone-based 3D meshes, we show that our
approach significantly improves upon traditional methods for model conflations,
to drive new potentials to create excessively large and accurate full 3D mesh
models in support of geoscience and environmental applications.