EuroSDR Projects - Host Ireland

3.1.4 Level of Automation
3.1.4.1 Summary
The degree of automation was estimated as a value from 0 (0 = no automation in the process) to 10
(10= fully automatic) based on the workflow charts and the procedure descriptions and comments
provided by the participants (Table 3-4).
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Test site
Participant Espoonlahti Hermanni Senaatti Amiens
CyberCity 3 3 3
Hamburg 3 3
Stuttgart 5 7 3
IGN 5 5 5 6
Nebel+Partner 6 6 6 6
ICC laser+aerial 4 6 4
ICC laser 4 6 4
FOI 10 10 10 10
FOI outlines 10 10 10 10
C+B Technik 6 6 6 7
Delft 7 6
Aalborg 8
Dresden 9 9
* It should noticed that the degree of automation has been subjectively estimated. The
accuracy of the estimation is not high and more information about the automation level can be
obtained from each individual methods depicted in Chapter 3.1.2.
3.1.4.2 CyberCity AG
Table 3-4: Estimated degree of automation in building extraction*.
CyberCity can use automatic procedures when creating roof topology from manually measured points
and when refining the extracted building, but the level of automation is considered low. This is also a
choice made by CyberCity: “Due to the complexity of natural scenes and the lack of performance of
image understanding algorithms, the fully automated methods cannot guarantee results stable and
reliable enough for practical use. Therefore, CyberCity has developed a semi-automated approach,
which gives the human operator strong computational support in order to generate 3D City models
from aerial images efficiently“ (Grün and Wang, 1998a,b).
3.1.4.3 Hamburg University of Applied Sciences
Although there is some automation included, most procedures required work by the operator (see
Figure 3-3), and the level of automation is considered to be low.
3.1.4.4 Nebel + Partner and ICC
Nebel + Partner used automatic and semi-automatic procedures for building extraction after automatic
classification of laser scanner data (see Figure 3-8). The level of automation can be considered
medium as time-consuming manual corrections were carried out.