SVI2LoD3: Agent-Driven Reconstruction of LoD3 Façade Openings in Semantic 3D City Models from Volunteered Street View Imagery using Large Language and Visual Models

Abstract

This paper presents an end-to-end, agent-driven pipeline for the LoD3 reconstruction of façade openings in 3D city models, producing directly usable CityGML-conform outputs. In contrast to existing approaches that rely on supervised semantic segmentation and therefore require large amounts of manually annotated training data, the proposed method employs a zero-shot segmentation strategy. This substantially reduces the annotation effort while still achieving strong performance in our benchmark on the eTRIMS dataset. A further key contribution is the enforcement of correct partonomic hierarchies, thereby producing CityGMLconform LoD3 building models. Beyond the reconstruction pipeline itself, this work also introduces a novel evaluation metric for façade reconstruction, termed Facade Feature Distance (FFD). Unlike conventional metrics such as mIoU or FRDS, which assess similarity primarily through pixel-wise overlap, FFD measures distance in a high-level feature space derived from a vision transformer. In doing so, it captures both semantic correctness and architectural layout, providing a more suitable assessment of façade reconstruction quality. The proposed pipeline and evaluation strategy together offer a practical and scalable contribution toward the automated generation and analysis of semantically enriched 3D city models. The developed code is published at: https://github.com/hcu-cml/citydb-SVI2LoD3-ai.