Design and Deployment of Photo2Building: A Cloud-based Procedural Modeling Tool as a Service

TL;DR

This paper introduces Photo2Building, a cloud-based service that quickly generates plausible 3D building models from a single photo, supporting urban planning and climate resilience efforts.

Contribution

It converts a desktop tool into a scalable, web-accessible service with rapid processing and low cost, enabling widespread use in urban design and planning.

Findings

Reconstructs building models in 40 seconds on average

Costs approximately 0.60 USD per reconstruction

Supports concurrent usage and web accessibility

Abstract

We present a Photo2Building tool to create a plausible 3D model of a building from only a single photograph. Our tool is based on a prior desktop version which, as described in this paper, is converted into a client-server model, with job queuing, web-page support, and support of concurrent usage. The reported cloud-based web-accessible tool can reconstruct a building in 40 seconds on average and costing only 0.60 USD with current pricing. This provides for an extremely scalable and possibly widespread tool for creating building models for use in urban design and planning applications. With the growing impact of rapid urbanization on weather and climate and resource availability, access to such a service is expected to help a wide variety of users such as city planners, urban meteorologists worldwide in the quest to improved prediction of urban weather and designing climate-resilient cities of the future.