Abstract Urban procedural modeling has benefited from recent advances in deep learning and computer graphics. However, few, if any, approaches have automatically produced procedural building roof models from a single overhead satellite image. Large‐scale roof modeling is important for a variety of applications in urban content creation and in urban planning (e.g., solar panel planning, heating/cooling/rainfall modeling). While the allure of modeling only from satellite images is clear, unfortunately structures obtained from the satellite images are often in low‐resolution, noisy and heavily occluded, thus getting a clean and complete view of urban structures is difficult. In this paper, we present a framework that exploits the inherent structure present in man‐made buildings and roofs by explicitly identifying the compact space of potential building shapes and roof structures. Then, we utilize this relatively compact space with a two‐component solution combining procedural modeling and deep learning. Specifically, we use a building decomposition component to separate the building into roof parts and predict regularized building footprints in a procedural format, and use a roof ridge detection component to refine the individual roof parts by estimating the procedural roof ridge parameters. Our qualitative and quantitative assessments over multiple satellite datasets show that our method outperforms various state‐of‐the‐art methods.

Automatic creation of lightweight 3D building models from satellite image data enables large and widespread 3D interactive urban rendering. Towards this goal, we present an inverse procedural modeling method to automatically create building envelopes from satellite imagery. Our key observation is that buildings exhibit regular properties. Hence, we can overcome the low-resolution, noisy, and partial building data obtained from satellite by using a two stage inverse procedural modeling technique. Our method takes in point cloud data obtained from multi-view satellite stereo processing and produces a crisp and regularized building envelope suitable for fast rendering and optional projective texture mapping. Further, our results show highly complete building models with quality superior to that of other compared-to approaches.